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Lot Essay
Sideboard-tables designed in the early 1750s by the architect James Paine (d. 1789) for Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, first introduced a bacchic ram mask, together with such paired pilaster legs and echinous-moulded cornice as appears on this table (see G. Jackson-Stops, 'Pre-Adam Furniture Designs at Nostell Priory', Furniture History, 1974, pls. 11A and B). However its elegant form and ornament corresponds to the antique or Roman style promoted in the later 1750s by architects such as Robert Adam (d. 1792). This fashion was adopted by the cabinet-maker Thomas Chippendale, whose third edition of The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1762 included most of the elements found here, such as the central tablet, the husk-festooned ram, as well as the antique-fluted frieze and taper-hermed pilasters rising from rectangular plinths (Director, pls. CLXXVI, LXVIII, and XVII). In 1774 the St. Martins Lane firm of Chippendale, Haig & Co. also supplied a closely related sideboard-table for Paxton House, Berwickshire, Scotland, which features the fluted frieze with husk-festooned ram, but its hermed legs terminate in hermed stumps. (N. Tranter, Paxton House, Norwich, 1993, fig. 21 and C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, p. 193, fig. 351). However, the legs' flowered patterae and palm-flowered plinths do correspond to those on a pair of sideboard tables that the firm supplied for Harewood House, Yorkshire in the early 1770s (ibid., fig. 350).