The architect Robert Adam's 'antique' or 'Etruscan' style fostered a taste for inlaid tablets and medallions in the decoration of fashionable apartments for the 1770s. The jasper medallions of bacchanalian youths or 'antique boys' after the manner of Duquesnay (d. 1643), known as 'Fiammingo' were manufactured at this time by Messrs. Wedgwood and Bentley, and in the following decade these were joined by their more studious brethren or genii, emblematical of the Liberal Arts. The 'Infant Music Academy' medallion portrayed on this table was originally modelled in 1785 as a companion to an 'Infant Art Academy', modelled after Francis Haward's 1783 engraving of a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The conceit of children playing at adult activities had for some years been popularised by engravings of the work of François Boucher. The youthful artist, in Reynolds' painting, is depicted on a seat derived from his Doric-style Sitter's-chair, while an Apollo-like youth, in this medallion, is seated on a related stool, whose loose drapery also festoons a Grecian lyre. Hackwood's initial composition included a laurel-sprig accompanying a love-trophy of Venus' doves amongst musical instruments. Reflecting the fashion for embellishing drawing-room ceilings with Zodiac emblems surrounding a central medallion, as introduced by the architect James Stuart about 1760; the table's medallion, portraying the labour of music-making, is encircled by the eternal heavenly Zodiac signs from Aquarius, the water-bearer, to Capricorn, the goat, as representing the months of the year. This composition is likely to have derived from an engraving on an antique intaglio, with a Zodiac-banded scene of Jupiter's court, that was published in P. J. Mariette's Traite des Pierre Graves, 1750.

The chinoiserie embellishment of this guèridon-table and the ormolu 'woven' rim, relate to Wedgwood's dejeuner sets, featuring bacchanalian youths on cluster-bamboo ware. The latter derives from a Chinese teapot, illustrated in Sir William Chambers' Designs of Chinese Buildings, 1757. No doubt his bamboo guèridon-stand, with central vase-pedestal, can be seen as a prototype for this cluster-columned table which also relates to the French 'Athenienne' stand.

This table, with its exotic marble-effect veneer, harmonises with the French fashion for the Anglo-Chinois garden promoted by the French edition of Chambers (op.cit.). It also combines the enthusiasm for the 'Etruscan' or 'Pompeian' style, and for antique gems and cameos, with the taste for romanticism and sentimentality.

It epitomises the fashionable Louis XVI style, lead by arbiters of taste such as Madame du Barry whose celebrated Pavillon at Louveciennes was furnished with one of these tables, delivered by Ligneureux and Daguerre in 1791. It is very likely that Dominique Daguerre, the celebrated marchand-mercier, was responsible for the design and marketing of this model of table, which continued the tradition of furniture mounted with Sèvres porcelain plaques as pioneered by the dealer Poirier in the 1760's. This was transformed to the antique manner with the introduction of Wedgwood and Bentley's cameo tablets, first introduced to France by the dealer Granchet 'of A petit Dunkerque'. From 1787, Daguerre was Wedgwood's representative in Paris, and it was in that same year that Sir William Eden, the British minister plenipotentiary in Paris, was to inform Wedgwood that his 'Figures En Relief are far beyond anything that has been attempted anywhere.

A drawing of a related table with this pattern of top, together with a drawing of this model of table, is in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. The latter is annotated 'les bronze argentés S. Kawrovsky'. Comte Skavronsky was the Russian Ambassador to Naples (see: M. Segoura, Weisweiler, Paris, 1983, pp. 97, 90). Other tables of this type are known of which a number are stamped by Weisweiler which would indicate that this model was probably made exclusively by him to be marketed by Daguerre.