Lot Essay
The sideboard-tables are conceived in the George II antique or Roman manner and embellished in the French fashion with acanthus-scrolled and embossed cartouches. The frames' projecting and canted 'tablet' corners are supported on voluted trusses, imbricated with Venus dolphin-scales, wrapped by husk-festooned Roman acanthus and terminate in bacchic lion feet. The trusses, in the manner of Inigo jones, relate to William Kent's 'Chiswick' chimneypiece and 'Walpole' sideboard-table pattern of 1731 illustrated in J. Vardy's Some Designs of Mr Inigo Jones and Mr William Kent, 1744 (pls. 35 and 41); while lion-paws featured on a 1739 table-frame pattern, with central acanthus-wrapped cartouche, illustrated in B. Langley The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1745 (pl. CLV). Related legs feature on a sideboard-table from Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire (illustrated R. Edwards, Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1977, p. 586, fig. 32).