The quality and style of this 'British' brown-oak table, designed in the French-Grecian manner, with ormolu-wreathed pillar-supports and 'Etruscan-black' inlay in the 'antique' manner, is synonymous with the work of Liverpool Upholder George Bullock (d. 1818) around the time of his establishment of his Pall Mall, London show-rooms in 1812. Related pedestal designs appear amongst the Bullock Wilkinson furniture tracings in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. There is also a possibility of its being the dining-table, or the prototype for one commissioned through the British Government by George, Prince Regent, later King George IV, for the use of 'General Napoleon Bonaparte' (d. 1812) at New Longwood, St. Helena. This pattern of 'pillar' table appears on Bullock's proposal of 1815 (three pillar) for the furnishing of the dining room of the Grecian villa which had been designed for Napoleon by the architect William Atkinson (d. 1839), who at the time was Architect of the Board of Works and was also collaborating with Bullock on the furnishing of Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford House, Roxburghshire. The patterns of chairs proposed included one of 'consular' form, like Napoleon's chair (illustrated M. Levy, 'Napoleon's fauteuil de malade', Apollo, May, 1991, pp. 307-11, fig. 4) and another like the ebonised chair with ormolu laurel-wreath in the Musée de Malmaison (illustrated with the Dining Room design in George Bullock, Cabinet-Maker, Exh. Cat., London, 1988, figs. 8 and 9). The latter, appropriate for commemorating a hero such as Horatio Nelson (d. 1805) would hardly have met with the Prince's declaration that the furnishings were to be in a style appropriate to Napoleon's rank as a defeated general and without allusions to his previous status as Emperor. However, the table's golden flower-studded laurel-wreaths can perhaps be considered as appropriate festive 'poetic' ornament.