Lot Essay
The sofa-table's fretted and crocketed trestles are richly carved on both sides with herldic beasts and escutcheons amongst flowers and luscious foliage. The table was designed by the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (d.1852) for Charles Scarisbrick (d.1860), who in 1833 inherited the Lancashire Tudor manor, Scarisbrick Hall, that had recently been aggrandised by the architect Thomas Rickman (d.1841). Its form relates to sofa-tables commissioned by George IV for Windsor Castle in the 1820s and designed, in part, by Pugin under the direction of Nicholas Morel in partnership with George Seddon (C. Wainwright, 'A.W.N. Pugin's Early Furniture', The Connoisseur, January 1976, pp. 3-11, fig. 3). However, this table reflects the florid Gothic manner that Pugin was to adopt as his 'New Palace of Westminster' style, featured in Rudolph Ackermann's antiquarian publication Gothic Furniture in the Style of the 15th Century Designed and Etched by A.W.N. Pugin, 1835. Pugin's pattern for an armchair conceived in the 'Louis Douze' style, was commissioned the following year in Frth, Germany, as noted in a letter written by his friend, the Wardour Street antique dealer, John Coleman Isaacs. The chair, imported via Hamburg, appears to have provided the prototype for a suite of drawing-room chairs, introduced by Pugin at Scarisbrick in the late 1830s, and executed with richly carved frames corresponding to this table (Wainwright, op.cit., fig. 14 and M. Aldrich et al, A.W.N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, New Haven and London, 1995, no. 29). Such furniture also harmonised with Pugin's 1836 scheme proposed for Scarisbrick's Banqueting-Hall (Wainwright, op.cit., p. 9). The room has since been admired for its 'magnificent and elaborately carved oak screen' and its 'spandrels and roof filled with representations of andeluvian and fabulous monsters ...'. The carving of such ornament on this table's trestles is exceptionally fine, and in view of Pugin's difficulty in establishing a national school of carvers for his Palace of Westminster furniture, it would seem possible that this table was also executed in Germany in the 1830s.