Lot Essay
The design for a reed-edged table, with tripod-altar pedestal and palm-enriched plinth and bacchic lion-paws, was introduced around 1800 to his Duchess Street mansion/museum by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d.1831). Appropriately for a library table, its top is inlaid in the French-Etruscan manner with Urania's starred diadem wreathed by poetic ribbon-bands of laurel and palm-flowers. There a small number of tables of the highest quality and which conform to this basic pattern. They have distinguished provenances in 20th Century collections.
1. The Duchess Street table of this pattern is that illustrated in Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pl. 39. Having been in the collection of Edward Knoblock it was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1936 and is illustrated in C. Musgrave, Regency Furniture, London, 1961, fig. 13. The Hope design and this table have inlaid panels of marquetry in the base.
2. Hope owned at least one further table of the type but with actual panels in the base as with the present table, and like it with no marquetry within those panels. A table with such a base, without marquetry and with gilded feet, is illustrated in a watercolour of the Small Drawing Room at The Deepdene, Hope's country house that he acquired in 1807. The watercolour is by Penry Williams and is dated 1818; it is reproduced in M. Descamps, Empire, London, 1994, p. 184. This is presumably the same table that was said to be from The Deepdene when it was illustrated from Edward Knoblock's collection in M. Jourdain, English Decoration and Furniture of the Later XVIIIth Century, New York, 1922, p. 203, fig. 321. By the time that table was in Knoblock's collection the feet had been ebonised. It was subsequently sold anonymously, Sotheby's London, 5 October 1973, lot 152, and has an 'Edward Knoblock, 21 Ashley Place, S.W.1' label. 3. In a photograph of the Painted Library at the Beach House (loc. cit.) there is a table of this type which had neither marquetry in the centre of the top, nor in the panels of the base and which is almost certainly the present lot
Therefore Knoblock owned three tables of this type; it was of one of them that the Italian writer Mario Praz wrote when he had visited Knoblock in Ashley Place in September 1937
'The inlaid table was the companion of one owned by Lord Wellesley (sic), descendant of Wellington, and another in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and had come from the Deepdene sale in 1917, which marked a culminating point in Knoblock's life, that decisive turning-point that marriage represents for ordinary mortals'
1. The Duchess Street table of this pattern is that illustrated in Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pl. 39. Having been in the collection of Edward Knoblock it was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1936 and is illustrated in C. Musgrave, Regency Furniture, London, 1961, fig. 13. The Hope design and this table have inlaid panels of marquetry in the base.
2. Hope owned at least one further table of the type but with actual panels in the base as with the present table, and like it with no marquetry within those panels. A table with such a base, without marquetry and with gilded feet, is illustrated in a watercolour of the Small Drawing Room at The Deepdene, Hope's country house that he acquired in 1807. The watercolour is by Penry Williams and is dated 1818; it is reproduced in M. Descamps, Empire, London, 1994, p. 184. This is presumably the same table that was said to be from The Deepdene when it was illustrated from Edward Knoblock's collection in M. Jourdain, English Decoration and Furniture of the Later XVIIIth Century, New York, 1922, p. 203, fig. 321. By the time that table was in Knoblock's collection the feet had been ebonised. It was subsequently sold anonymously, Sotheby's London, 5 October 1973, lot 152, and has an 'Edward Knoblock, 21 Ashley Place, S.W.1' label. 3. In a photograph of the Painted Library at the Beach House (loc. cit.) there is a table of this type which had neither marquetry in the centre of the top, nor in the panels of the base and which is almost certainly the present lot
Therefore Knoblock owned three tables of this type; it was of one of them that the Italian writer Mario Praz wrote when he had visited Knoblock in Ashley Place in September 1937
'The inlaid table was the companion of one owned by Lord Wellesley (sic), descendant of Wellington, and another in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and had come from the Deepdene sale in 1917, which marked a culminating point in Knoblock's life, that decisive turning-point that marriage represents for ordinary mortals'