The table, conceived as a Roman altar, is designed in the antique manner promoted around 1800 by the architect Charles Heathcote Tatham (d. 1842). Its reed-hermed tripod frame is flowered with golden palms and green-patinated in the antique bronze fashion. Its design relates to a sideboard-table with 'thermed feet with Leopards' heads and Lions' feet', that was designed in 1802 for Stourhead, Wiltshire by Thomas Chippendale Junior (d. 1822) (D. Dodd, Stourhead, 1988, Over Wallop, p. 20).
A sideboard pattern for related hermed legs also featured in George Smiths, Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1808 (pl. 91) together with a pattern for a related circular 'Dejeune' breakfast-table (pl. 82). Smith also published patterns for 'jardiniere' tables (pl. 143) and the height of the present table may indicate that it too was intended as a 'jardiniere' plant-stand, such as those incorporating Imari dishes and displayed at Corsham Court, Wiltshire (see J. Ayers et al., Porcelain for Palaces, London, 1990, fig. 251). In particular the hermed legs relate to those of Stourhead's three 'jardinieres', described by Chippendale as 'Sarcophagus's for the recesses of windows [...] carved and painted white and part bronzed.' (see J. Lees-Milne, Stourhead, London, 1964, pp. 28-29).
The palm bas-reliefs correspond to those of a library-table supplied around 1800 for Thomas Hope's Duchess Street mansion (T. Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pls. XI, no. 2 and XLI no. 15).