POSSIBLY BY MAYHEW AND INCE

This table-frame, appropriate to a bedroom apartment, is designed in the George III 'Roman' fashion and evokes the antique 'sarcophagus' chest with strigilated flutes. The latter's combination with 'Apollo' sunflowered medallions also featured on Pantheonic seats designed in the mid-1770s for Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire by the Berkeley Square cabinet-maker John Linnell (H. Hayward and P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980, vol. II, fig. 259). Its legs are tapered as hermed and antique-fluted pillars with libation-patteraed plinths. It corresponds to a pier-table supplied for Thomas Rumbold's Roman villa, Woodhall Park, Hertfordshire, that had been designed by the architect Thomas Leverton (d. 1824). It has been suggested that Leverton was assisted by the architect Joseph Bonomi, who exhibited a closely related table design at the 1782 Royal Academy (P. Macquoid and R. Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1927, vol. III, p. 297, fig. 66; and P. Meadows and J. Cornforth, 'Draughtsman Decorator', Country Life, 19 April 1990, p.166, fig. 5). A writing-table at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire is amongst some related furniture that is likely to have been designed in the 1770s under the direction of the architect Sir William Chambers by John Mayhew of the Soho firm of Ince and Mayhew, celebrated authors of The Universal System of Household Furniture, 1762 (see The Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace, Oxford, 1988, p. 25 and H. Roberts, 'Furniture for the 4th Duke of Marlborough', Furniture History, 1994, pp. 117-149). Messrs Mayhew and Ince were also among the principal suppliers of furniture to Woodhall in the 1780s. In view of the above, there is a possiblity that they also made this wash-stand.