Designed to accompany a sideboard-table, this richly carved elliptical sarcophagus wine-cistern with reed and pearl bands, epitomises the antique manner promoted by Charles Heathcote Tatham (d.1842), architect to George, Prince of Wales, later King George IV. It relates to the plinth-supported 'celerette' with festive bacchic masks and waterleaf palm-enriched borders that features as plate 98 in, A Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1808, published by the Prince's 'Upholder' George Smith. The Indian or beared Bacchus and pine-wreathed Silenus masks that hang from the ribbon-tied and vine-wreathed cornice, derive from furnishings in the Duchess Street mansion/museum established by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d.1832) and illustrated in his, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807. The masks correspond to those in a dining-room chimneypiece from Bridgewater house, London, that is likely to have been designed by Tatham for George Granville Leveson-Gower, later created 1st Duke of Sutherland (d.1833). It is possible that this splendid cistern was designed for the same room.

The theatric-mask embellishment, popularised by the Earl of Warwick's celebrated antique vase, now in the Burrell Collection, Scotland, was adapted as a chimney-piece frieze, executed, no doubt under the direction of Charles Heathcote Tatham, by the Rome-based sculptor John Deare (d.1798), and provided for George III's Frogmore House, Windsor in 1795. (See: D. Watkin, Royal Interiors of Regency England, London 1984, p.94).