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Lot Essay
This pair of pier-table is designed in the George II 'Roman' sideboard-table fashion popularised by the architects such as William Kent (d. 1748). William Jones' The Gentleman or Builder's Companion, 1739 (pl. 27) issued a pattern for a related marble-topped console-table, with wave-scrolled frieze wrapped by Roman acanthus and centred by a Venus-shell, and with acanthus-enriched legs headed by bacchic satyr-masks displayed on the similar voluted scrolls which terminate in bacchic lion paws (P. Ward-Jackson, English Furniture Designs of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1958, pl. 21).
A pair of tables of similar design, although of a grander scale and more elaborately conceived with central Diana mask was sold from Stowe House, Buckinghamshire in Christie's 1848 sale and are now in the collections at Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, having been purchased by Lord Leverhulme in 1919 (illustrated in the Gallery Guide, 1996, fig. 47). A further set of four tables at the Detroit Institute of Arts is virtually identical to the Stowe/Leverhulme pair, displaying a shell badge in lieu of the Diana mask (one of these is almost certainly illustrated in R.T. Evans, 'The Furniture Designs of William Kent', The Antiquarian, January 1930, p. 44). Another of this form is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other closely related tables include one sold, the property of Michael Lipitch, Sotheby's London, 22 May 1998 lot 31. Another, with wave-scrolled frieze, was illustrated by Stair & Company Ltd at The Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, 1997.
A pair of tables of similar design, although of a grander scale and more elaborately conceived with central Diana mask was sold from Stowe House, Buckinghamshire in Christie's 1848 sale and are now in the collections at Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, having been purchased by Lord Leverhulme in 1919 (illustrated in the Gallery Guide, 1996, fig. 47). A further set of four tables at the Detroit Institute of Arts is virtually identical to the Stowe/Leverhulme pair, displaying a shell badge in lieu of the Diana mask (one of these is almost certainly illustrated in R.T. Evans, 'The Furniture Designs of William Kent', The Antiquarian, January 1930, p. 44). Another of this form is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other closely related tables include one sold, the property of Michael Lipitch, Sotheby's London, 22 May 1998 lot 31. Another, with wave-scrolled frieze, was illustrated by Stair & Company Ltd at The Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, 1997.