拍品專文
The richly flowered marquetry top is designed in the Louis XIV 'antique' manner and depicts birds and butterflies accompanying a flower-filled krater vase, that is embellished with a festive Bacchic lion-mask. This derives from engravings of decorative over-door paintings of pedestal-supported vases executed by the French artist Jean Baptiste Monnoyer (d.1699). The vase is supported amongst wreath-tied and serpentined whirls of 'roman' foliage, 'that derive from mid 17th Century engravings published by the ornamentalist Paul Androuet de Cerceau' in his Livre d'Ornemens de Feuillages, and are enriched with naturalistic spring flowers. Such marquetry relates to that executed by The Hague craftsmen such as Philips van Santwijck in the 1680's. A related table-top, lacking the flower vase, is illustrated in H.H. Mulliner, The Decorative Arts in England 1660-1780, London, figs. 40 and 41. Its frame and drawer-handle relate to those of a marquetry table at Ham House, Richmond (see P. Thornton, 'Ham House', F.H.S. Journal, 1980, fig. 88). Such colourful dressing-tables, accompanied by low stands and a mirror, were fashionable furnishing for window-piers of bedroom apartments in the late 17th Century; and were often supplied en suite with a cabinet-on-stand