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Lot Essay
Almost identical to the "Pire-Table," engraved design Plate 63, in Thomas Sheraton's The Cabinet Dictionary, published in London in 1803, this pier table is among the most ambitious of Thomas Seymour's early Boston Regency designs. Seymour relied heavily on Sheraton's design manual for furniture made between 1809 and 1817, including sofa tables, quartetto tables and card tables based on English design prototypes.
With its mahogany frame, marble top, superbly stylized leaf carving executed by the Seymours' favored carver, Thomas Wrightman, and reeding on the legs, this pier table would have been commissioned by the wealthiest of the Seymours' clients as the form served as a conspicuous talisman of wealth and status. Typically it would have been accompanied by expensive lighting devices such as argand lamps and gilt looking glasses on the wall behind.
The marble top present is an imported Italian marble similar to the species Breche Violette from a quarry in Servezza in the Carrara Basin of Italy. Its inscription on the underside Joel Koopman/ 18 Beacon Street/ Boston/ Mass refers to the handling of this piece by the Boston antiques sales firm sometime before the business relocated to New York in 1936.
With its mahogany frame, marble top, superbly stylized leaf carving executed by the Seymours' favored carver, Thomas Wrightman, and reeding on the legs, this pier table would have been commissioned by the wealthiest of the Seymours' clients as the form served as a conspicuous talisman of wealth and status. Typically it would have been accompanied by expensive lighting devices such as argand lamps and gilt looking glasses on the wall behind.
The marble top present is an imported Italian marble similar to the species Breche Violette from a quarry in Servezza in the Carrara Basin of Italy. Its inscription on the underside Joel Koopman/ 18 Beacon Street/ Boston/ Mass refers to the handling of this piece by the Boston antiques sales firm sometime before the business relocated to New York in 1936.