This George II design for a chimneypiece, with bas relief tablet and trussed brackets, is in the Roman fashion introduced by Inigo Jones (d.1652) and popularised in the mid 18th Century by publications such as Isaac Ware's A Complete Body of Architecture, 1756. The acanthus-wrapped brackets are accompanied by bacchic vine-bearing rams recalling feasts in antiquity; while the tablet of the Muse Urania attended by genii with a celestial globe, evokes Mt. Helicon as the abode of Apollo and the Liberal Arts. In 1754 a bas-relief tablet of this pattern was incorporated in a chimney-piece set up in the Saloon at Holkham, Norfolk by the Mayfair sculptor Thomas Carter (d.1756) (J. Cornforth, Augustan Vision Restored, Country Life, 4 August 1988, pp. 90-92, fig. 3).
See lot 119 for a tablet of similar design.