The elegant sofa table, concealing chess and backgammon boards, has its black-figured rosewood veneer embellished with ivory patera handles and an inlaid cypher. With its fine stringing of golden satinwood creating trompe l'oeil flutes, it reflects the antique or Grecian fashion promoted by Thomas Sheraton, who illustrated its slide-top games board, together with Pompeian pillared trestles on Grecian-scrolled 'claws', in his pattern for a lady's work-table or 'Pouch Table' in The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803 (pl. 67). A related ivory 'GS' cypher had been inlaid in the mid-1770s on a cabinet presented to Georgiana, Countess of Spencer (d. 1806) (P. Thornton, 'Spencer Furniture at Althorp - III', Apollo, August, 1968, fig. 6).
The cypher 'EB', for Elizabeth Beaufort, appears as the entwined back on a pair of George II mahogany armchairs, attributed to John Linnell and supplied to the 4th Duke of Beaufort (d. 1759) for Badminton, Gloucestershire (sold by Lord Tollemache, Christie's London, 13-15 May 1953, lot 111 and illustrated in E. Lennox-Boyd (ed.), Masterpieces of English Furniture, The Gerstenfeld Collection, London, 1998, p. 211, cat. no. 40).