Lot Essay
The desk, with end tablets framed in French fashion with hollow-cornered reeds, relates to a 1759 'Library Table' pattern in Thomas Chippendale's, Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 3rd ed. 1762; but the latter's flowers are replaced by the later form of Grecian pearled paterae. Its columnar-corners also have elegant urn-capped and antique-fluted pillars that reflect the Pompeian fashion as popularised by M. Lock's, New Book of Pier Frames, 1769; and later adopted in the mid-1770s for a 'commode' chest-of-drawers supplied for Burley-on-the Hill, Rutland (R. Edwards and P. Macquoid, The Dictionary of English Furniture, rev. ed., 1954, vol. II, p. 52, fig. 56).