Lot Essay
The sideboard - table (console desserte) is likely to have been commissioned by George Parker, later 4th Earl of Macclesfield following his marriage in 1780 to Mary Frances Drake. In 1780 he received a court appointment as one of the Lords of the Bedchamber at a time that the Prince of Wales was embellishing his apartments at The Queen's House (now Buckingham Palace) and before his move to Carlton House. George Parker succeeded to the Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire estate in 1795.
It typifies the very elegant George III French/antique fashion promoted in London's West End in the 1780s by his son the future George IV, when Prince of Wales, and by his architect Henry Holland (d.1806) with assistance from the Piccadilly marchand mercier Dominique Daguerre (d.1796). Intended to be dressed with plate etc., it presents a 'Roman' marble 'buffet' or 'altar' with its hollow-cornered statuary white marble slab supported on a paired-pillar frame tied by a china-railed stretcher and japanned ensuite with golden Roman-fashioned 'bronze' enrichments. Recalling the embellishment of the sun and poetry deity Apollo's Temple at Palmyra, a festive interlaced ribbon-fretted guilloche of libation-plates (paterae) wreathes its frieze like trompe l'oeil ormolu; while altar-hollowed capitals crown its tapered and plinth-supported columnar pilasters, whose antique-flutes are spiralled liked Jupiter's thunderbolts and evoke poets' account of 'the banquets of the gods' in antiquity. Its pattern can be related to Holland's Pompeian-pillared pier-tables designed for Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire (see P. Ward-Jackson, English Furniture Designs, London, 1958, fig. 302).
It typifies the very elegant George III French/antique fashion promoted in London's West End in the 1780s by his son the future George IV, when Prince of Wales, and by his architect Henry Holland (d.1806) with assistance from the Piccadilly marchand mercier Dominique Daguerre (d.1796). Intended to be dressed with plate etc., it presents a 'Roman' marble 'buffet' or 'altar' with its hollow-cornered statuary white marble slab supported on a paired-pillar frame tied by a china-railed stretcher and japanned ensuite with golden Roman-fashioned 'bronze' enrichments. Recalling the embellishment of the sun and poetry deity Apollo's Temple at Palmyra, a festive interlaced ribbon-fretted guilloche of libation-plates (paterae) wreathes its frieze like trompe l'oeil ormolu; while altar-hollowed capitals crown its tapered and plinth-supported columnar pilasters, whose antique-flutes are spiralled liked Jupiter's thunderbolts and evoke poets' account of 'the banquets of the gods' in antiquity. Its pattern can be related to Holland's Pompeian-pillared pier-tables designed for Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire (see P. Ward-Jackson, English Furniture Designs, London, 1958, fig. 302).