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拍品專文
The table-top is veneered with a variegated figured tablet of oak, which is opened lengthways and wreathed by an Etruscan-black laurel in the French/antique manner. The baluster-tied trestles comprise paired and reeded pillars, whose Grecian-scrolled 'claws', ebony banded like the drawers, terminate in bacchic lion-paws. Its top may be of Manx oak since it relates to that of an inlaid circular table of 'Bog oak from the Isle of Man', supplied in 1814 to John Murray, 4th Duke of Atholl (d. 1830) by George Bullock (d. 1818) of Tenterden Street, London. The ribbon-band of laurels are inlaid with separate stems, while those of the Atholl table are tied by a fillet, after a surviving pattern in the Bullock Wilkinson archives (C. Wainwright, George Bullock, London, 1988, no. 8). It has also been noted that a Stanley Bullock owned property on the Isle of Man, although a family connection has not been established to date.
A closely related sofa-table in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry at Boughton House, has flaps with cut-corners, such as Bullock described as 'octogan corners' (table detail visible in Boughton House, Guide Book, 1996, p. l0).
The 'claw' of this pattern features on a 'Small Octagon Oak Table' forming part of Bullock's 'Napoleonic' furnishings supplied for St. Helena, following the Emperor's defeat at Waterloo and request for protection in July 1815 from George, Prince Regent, later George IV, (Wainwright, op. cit, no. l9 and fig. 54). A larger ebony-inlaid octagon table, with related pillar supports, formed part of the Napoleonic furnishings, and its oak veneer was particularly admired in a report published in The London Packet, 23-25 October 1815, as 'formed out of one piece of exquisitely veined British oak, polished to the very highest degree' (M. Levy, 'Napoleon in exile', Furniture History, l998, p. 101. no. 26 and fig. 46).
A closely related sofa-table in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry at Boughton House, has flaps with cut-corners, such as Bullock described as 'octogan corners' (table detail visible in Boughton House, Guide Book, 1996, p. l0).
The 'claw' of this pattern features on a 'Small Octagon Oak Table' forming part of Bullock's 'Napoleonic' furnishings supplied for St. Helena, following the Emperor's defeat at Waterloo and request for protection in July 1815 from George, Prince Regent, later George IV, (Wainwright, op. cit, no. l9 and fig. 54). A larger ebony-inlaid octagon table, with related pillar supports, formed part of the Napoleonic furnishings, and its oak veneer was particularly admired in a report published in The London Packet, 23-25 October 1815, as 'formed out of one piece of exquisitely veined British oak, polished to the very highest degree' (M. Levy, 'Napoleon in exile', Furniture History, l998, p. 101. no. 26 and fig. 46).