The elegant 'Gothic' reed-clustered pillars, rise from 'antique' plinth-supported vases that are embellished with reed-filled flutes. This vase pattern, with reed-banded neck and hollow-waisted base, was introduced on a tripod tea-table that was supplied by Thomas Chippendale (d.1779) for a bedroom apartment at Harewood House, Yorkshire about 1770 (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, fig. 469). Sir Lawrence Dundas (d.1781) was amongst Chippendale's leading patrons, and while the latter's furnishings in the early 1760s for Moor Park, Hertfordshire and Arlington Street, London have been well documented by Christopher Gilbert, there are unfortunately no surviving accounts covering the period, when he may have executed these posts or the related posts on a bed with Grecian palm-flowered cornice (A. Coleridge, 'Some Rococo Cabinet-Makers and Sir Lawrence Dundas', Apollo, September 1967, p. 221, fig. 11 and A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, pl. 206). As Dundas' account books so remarkably testify, however, as well as Chippendale he employed no less than Samuel Norman, Fell and Turton, Vile and Cobb, France and Bradburn, Mayhew and Ince, James Lawson and Pierre Langlois in the 1760s alone, so it is difficult to conclusively attribute them both without further documentry evidence. Related Gothic posts, with vases wrapped by Roman acanthus, feature on a bed from Combe Abbey, Warwickshire that is also likely to have been supplied by Chippendale (sold anonymously, Christie's Monaco, 20 June 1994, lot 219).