Lot Essay
This novel multi-purpose item of dining-room furniture, with sideboard cistern cellarette accompanied by dumb-waiter shelves, is designed in the late 18th Century French antique manner. The polygonal sarcophagus chest, banded by reed-gadroons and with an Egyptian-striated frieze, is veneered with fine figured mahogany sunk in panels. It is supported, in Roman tripod manner, by hermed and vine-festooned pilasters capped by Bacchic lion-masks and terminating in Etruscan-scrolled supports and an 'altar' plinth on lion-footed castors. The front is partitioned for bottles, while the back is lined as a water-container. Its two 'dumb-waiter' trays for glasses, decanters and plates, with ribbon-fretted brass borders, are supported by reed-enriched columns.
In 1788 the pattern of beribboned vines featured on a herm-legged sideboard-table that Gillow of Oxford Street, London and Lancaster supplied to John Christian Curwen for the dining-room at Workington Hall, Cumbria, created by the architect John Carr (d. 1807). Thomas Sheraton's Cabinet Dictionary of 1803 (pl. 44) described the dumb-waiter as 'a useful piece of furniture', so it is possible that this dumb-waiter could have been commissioned to accompany a sideboard-table, such as that at Workington Hall, that had been provided a few years earlier.
The dumb-waiter formed part of the fine collection of English late eighteenth-century furniture assembled since the late nineteenth century by Frederick Behrens at his London apartment in Mount Street. The dealer/furniture historian Percy Macquoid may have assisted with the formation of the collection, some of which featured in his Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1908 (the dumb waiter was illustrated in vol. II, fig. 4). It later featured in his article in Country Life, 23 May 1925, p. 847.
In 1788 the pattern of beribboned vines featured on a herm-legged sideboard-table that Gillow of Oxford Street, London and Lancaster supplied to John Christian Curwen for the dining-room at Workington Hall, Cumbria, created by the architect John Carr (d. 1807). Thomas Sheraton's Cabinet Dictionary of 1803 (pl. 44) described the dumb-waiter as 'a useful piece of furniture', so it is possible that this dumb-waiter could have been commissioned to accompany a sideboard-table, such as that at Workington Hall, that had been provided a few years earlier.
The dumb-waiter formed part of the fine collection of English late eighteenth-century furniture assembled since the late nineteenth century by Frederick Behrens at his London apartment in Mount Street. The dealer/furniture historian Percy Macquoid may have assisted with the formation of the collection, some of which featured in his Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1908 (the dumb waiter was illustrated in vol. II, fig. 4). It later featured in his article in Country Life, 23 May 1925, p. 847.