CIRCA 1760, RE-DECORATED, IN THE MANNER OF WILLIAM AND JOHN LINNELL

This console table, with its pierced fretwork carving and apron centred by a foliate cartouche reminiscent of a pagoda is crafted in the fashionable George II and III ‘Chinese’ manner promoted by designers such as Matthias Lock and Henry Copland. The table recalls the inventive chinoiserie imagery featured in the work of the father and son partnership, William (d.1763) and John Linnell (d.1796), one of the earliest designers and carvers producing furniture in the 'Chinese taste'. In 1749 William Linnell supplied carving, decoration and furnishing to the Duke of Bedford for a Chinese house in the grounds of Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire which Horace Walpole described as 'the very first'. This was followed between 1752 and 1754 with the famous suite of japanned furniture commissioned by the 4th Duke of Beaufort for the Chinese Bedroom at Badminton House, Gloucestershire, comprising a spectacular bed with pagoda canopy, eight armchairs, dressing-commode and two pairs of standing shelves also with pagoda tops. In 1752 the Linnells supplied to Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu for her house in Hill Street, Mayfair, where she was installing her own 'Chinese' room just a short distance from the Beaufort's London house on Grosvenor Street, a japanned cabinet-on-stand with pierced and applied lattice work, a characteristic feature of the Linnell chinoiserie style. Both the Duke and Mrs. Montagu were following the prevailing fashion for chinoiserie, in fact the latter had written as early as 1749 signalling the arrival of the 'gaudy goût of the Chinese' as a reaction to 'Grecian elegance and symmetry, or Gothic grandeur and magnificence' (A. Oswald, 'Mrs. Montagu and the Chinese Taste', Country Life, 30 April 1953, pp.1328-9).

The overall form of the table relates to designs by the Linnells' contemporary Thomas Chippendale. With its fret-enriched frieze, central water-scalloped rocaille cartouche and ‘cut-through’ legs terminating in guttae feet, the table is particularly reminiscent of a design for a sideboard in Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754, plate LIX. In a note accompanying the illustration Chippendale writes, ‘The Feet and Rails…are cut through, which gives it an airy look.’ Perhaps the cabinet-maker responsible for the present table was inspired to the scale down the design following Chippendale's advice '[it] would be too slight for Marble-tops: Therefore the Tops will be better made of Wood'.