CIRCA 1740

These pier-tables are conceived in George II Roman fashion as sideboard-tables with Portor black marble slabs flecked in gold, and this is echoed by their plinths' bronze-black japanning. Roman-truss brackets support the golden frames which, like the slabs, are scalloped in cupid-bows with columnar corners. Beneath a foliate cornice, their friezes are wreathed by bas-relief ribbons bearing pelta tablets formed of confronted Vitruvian or Ionic wave-scrolls; while reed borders, enriched by flowered ribbon-guilloches, tie their water-bubbled lambrequins. The frames are supported by Roman foliage issuing from the bifurcating volutes of the Pan-reeded trusses, and these are raised by garlanded and hollow-scrolled pilasters that are wrapped by water-leaves and terminate in inward scrolled volutes. Their plinths of addorsed reed-scrolls terminate in bacchic lion-feet.

The tables' design evolved from Marble Table patterns issued in B. Langley's, City and Country Builders and Workmans Treasury of Designs, 1740; but their elegant picturesque form relates to patterns issued in Gaetano Brunetti's, Sixty Different Sorts of ornaments very useful to painters, sculptors, stone-carvers, wood-carvers, silversmiths etc., 1736-7. The latter inspired a related marble-topped table designed for Cusworth Hall, Yorkshire by the celebrated mid-18th century architect James Paine (d.1784), author of Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Mansion House of Doncaster (1751) and close collaborator with the St. Martins Lane cabinet-maker Thomas Chippendale (d.1779) (see G. Smith, Cusworth Hall, 1990, fig. 20).