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Lot Essay
The elliptic slab of white marble is encrusted with a richly polychromed Roman-mosaic of tablets and medallions including landscape vignettes in semi-precious stones (pietra dura) and trompe l'oeil scagliola. Its golden frame evokes lyric poetry with a wreath of triumphal palms and 'Etruscan' pearls enriched with 'Apollo' sunflowered tablets. The legs, of strigil-fluted pillars terminating in reeded plinths, relate to a 1760s table pattern incorporating a sunflowered medallion, which appeared in A New Book of Pier Frames, Ovals, Gerandoles, Tables, etc., 1769 (pl. 3) issued by the Clerkenwell Green carver Matthias Lock (d. 1797) ( M. Heckscher, 'Lock and Copland', Furniture History, 1979, pp. 11-23, pl. 65B).
In addition, both comparable legs and sunflowered tablets feature in Lock's contemporary sideboard- table drawing preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum (P. Ward-Jackson, Victoria & Albert Museum; English Furniture Designs, London, 1958, fig. 251). Both the drawing and engraved design are indebted to the 1767 drawing by the Rome-trained architect Robert Adam (d. 1792) for a sideboard-table at Osterley Park, Middlesex, where en suite pier tables displayed 'Antique Mosaic Marble' (M. Tomlin, Catalogue of Adam Period Furniture, London, 1982, C/4 and C/5). There is therefore a possibility that this table with bacchic sacred-veil drapery, as well as the Osterley tables, were executed by Matthias Lock.
In addition, both comparable legs and sunflowered tablets feature in Lock's contemporary sideboard- table drawing preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum (P. Ward-Jackson, Victoria & Albert Museum; English Furniture Designs, London, 1958, fig. 251). Both the drawing and engraved design are indebted to the 1767 drawing by the Rome-trained architect Robert Adam (d. 1792) for a sideboard-table at Osterley Park, Middlesex, where en suite pier tables displayed 'Antique Mosaic Marble' (M. Tomlin, Catalogue of Adam Period Furniture, London, 1982, C/4 and C/5). There is therefore a possibility that this table with bacchic sacred-veil drapery, as well as the Osterley tables, were executed by Matthias Lock.