Lot Essay
The 'harlequin' bonheur-du-jour incorporates a fire-screen and conceals a writing-slide and fitted drawer for writing equipment in the frieze, as featured in 'Screen Table' and 'Writing Table' patterns in Thomas Sheraton's The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, l793 (pls. XLIII and XLIV). As the author noted concerning the former 'This table is intended for a lady to write or work at near the fire; the screen part behind securing her face from its injuries...'.
The work-box on this table is concealed like a bedroom apartment's 'breakfast-table', with wire-caged sides and hollowed front as evolved from a pattern in Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Directors, l754-l762 (pl. XXXIII). Veneered in golden maple and conceived in the antique manner fashionable around l770, its hermed feet, with Etruscan-black trompe l'oeil flutes, are appropriately crowned by sunflowered medallions recalling Apollo as poetry deity.
The spandrels of the 'tablet-cornered' top are flowered by whorled Roman acanthus and indented with quatrefoiled ribbon frets like the frieze tablets. Such tablet corners featured on a herm-legged and richly-inlaid table-stand attributed to the Berkeley Square cabinet-maker John Linnell (d. l796) and supplied to Robert Child (d. l782). Trompe l'oeil flutes and beautifully engraved medallions are a feature of his firm's work around l770 (see H. Hayward and P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980, p. 285).
A closely related ladies writing-table is illustrated in The Grosvenor House Antiques Fair Catalogue, 1989, p. 172 (Trade advertisement, Randolph, Hadleigh, Suffolk).
The work-box on this table is concealed like a bedroom apartment's 'breakfast-table', with wire-caged sides and hollowed front as evolved from a pattern in Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Directors, l754-l762 (pl. XXXIII). Veneered in golden maple and conceived in the antique manner fashionable around l770, its hermed feet, with Etruscan-black trompe l'oeil flutes, are appropriately crowned by sunflowered medallions recalling Apollo as poetry deity.
The spandrels of the 'tablet-cornered' top are flowered by whorled Roman acanthus and indented with quatrefoiled ribbon frets like the frieze tablets. Such tablet corners featured on a herm-legged and richly-inlaid table-stand attributed to the Berkeley Square cabinet-maker John Linnell (d. l796) and supplied to Robert Child (d. l782). Trompe l'oeil flutes and beautifully engraved medallions are a feature of his firm's work around l770 (see H. Hayward and P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980, p. 285).
A closely related ladies writing-table is illustrated in The Grosvenor House Antiques Fair Catalogue, 1989, p. 172 (Trade advertisement, Randolph, Hadleigh, Suffolk).