ATTRIBUTED TO WHYTOCK AND REID OF EDINBURGH

This table designed by Sir Robert Lorimer is inspired by Tuscan 16th Century design. Lorimer had bid for a villa near Asolo in 1914 but the World War had intervened, the sale did not go ahead and it had not seemed appropriate to revive the scheme in the changed world of 1918. The infusion of such elements into the furniture designs of Lorimer probably dates from the second decade of the 20th Century. A closely related, smaller table, with a rectangular top, designed for Gibliston, the house that the architect bought from Campbell connections in 1916 is on loan, from the family, to the National Trust for Scotland, in the Professor's room at Kellie Castle. The gently bowed top of the present example is a rare feature and the quality and lavish use of the timber raise the possibility that this was a special commission, perhaps made with wood that had come from the unidentified client's estate, a practice that this architect designed, the last great romantic, encouraged and that accorded with Lorimer's aspiration to "take a fine old model and do your own 'comments' upon it, and you have a sound sweet smelling thing fit to last a few hundred years....."