CIRCA 1775

The bedroom-apartment 'pembroke' breakfast-table is inlaid in the George III antique or 'Etruscan' fashion of the 1770s and displays lyric trophies celebrating love's triumph framed by palm-flowered trails of Roman acanthus. A tablet of Hymen's torch and Cupid's weapons is laurel-tied in a flowered compartment formed by a Venus pearl-string while sacred urns appear in lozenged compartments evoking Rome's Temple of Venus. This fashion was popularised by firms such as Messrs Mayhew and Ince of Golden Square, Soho. The use of pearled borders, well-delineated ebony lines and stylized motifs within an ebony or ebonized border are all characteristics of furniture produced by this firm (see numerous examples attributed to Mayhew and Ince exhibiting these features illustrated in Lucy Wood's Catalogue of Commodes, London, 1994).