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Lot Essay
This centre table was executed by the fashionable Tenterdon Street cabinet maker George Bullock (d.1818) in circa 1816-18. Having opened his famed 'Grecian Rooms' in both Liverpool and London's Piccadilly he executed many prestigious commissions such as that to furnish the St. Helena home of the exiled former French Emperor, Napoleon. This honeysuckle border pattern was employed by Bullock in various forms at several of his most notable commissions and may first have been conceived for an inkstand acquired by Queen Charlotte on her visit to Tenterden Street in 1812. The pattern also appears in the decoration of the 'loo table' supplied in 1817 to another notable patron, Mathew Robinson Boulton, for the Drawing Room at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, which was invoiced in 1817 as '1 Circular Oak Loo Table richly inlaid with Holly & white mouldings £28', and which was also made of native oak, probably acquired from Drumlanrig, Scotland. The Tew table was part of the wider scheme instituted by Bullock there, as Boulton had not only commissioned him to provide furniture but to oversee the decoration of the principal rooms (C. Wainwright et al., George Bullock, Cabinet-Maker, London, 1988, p.123). The Tew table was sold, Christie's, Great Tew, Oxfordshire, 27-29 May 1987, lot 33 and again Christie's London, 27 November 2003, lot 160 (£ 65,725 incl.). This honeysuckle or 'anthemion' pattern features in the Wilkinson tracings preserved in the Birmingham City Art Gallery, no. 208. A similarly decorated table was among the items purchased by the Earl of Wemyss at the auction following George Bullock's death in 1819 (Wainwright, Op. cit., p.96); furthermore the honeysuckle marquetry pattern was employed by Bullock on a table commissioned by the Countess Spencer circa 1818, and a table supplied to the Earls of Mansfield for Scone Palace, Perthshire, as well as a remarkable 'Boulle'-work ink stand (the latter is illustrated and discussed in M. Levy, 'Taking up the Pen', Country Life, 23 April 1992, p. 61, fig. 3). A further closely related Bullock centre table, this time in rosewood but again with Grecian honeysuckle border, was sold, Sotheby's, London, The Michael Lipitch Collection, 22 May 1998, lot 171 (£ 23,000 incl.).