SECOND QUARTER 19TH CENTURY, BY EDWARD HOLMES BALDOCK, INCORPORATING EARLIER ELEMENTS

The tapering hermed pedestals, raised on claw-footed and ebonised plinths, are enriched with Louis XV style floral marquetry and ormolu mounts. The latter comprise bands of flutes, palms and ribbon guilloches, while ribbon-twists with hollowed corners, frame the capitals or faces and tapering pedestals. The former are flowered with sprigs including roses and sunflowers, while the latter display ribbon-tied husks and floral trails suspended by rings from festive satyr-masks. The pedestal shape relates to a marquetried 'Term for Busts, etc.' illustrated in A. Hepplewhite & Co.'s The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide, 1788 (pl. 120). The marquetry, in the mid-18th Century London fashion introduced by the Paris-trained bniste Pierre Langlois of Tottenham Court Road, relates to that executed in the early 19th Century by the 'cabinet inlayer and buhl manufacturer', Robert Blake, who established premises off Tottenham Court Road in the 1820s and was patronised by the celebrated antique dealer Edward Holmes Baldock (see C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700-1840, Leeds, 1996, p. 18, fig. 131).