The sideboard-table was commissioned in the 1760's by Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower and later 1st Marquess of Stafford (d.1803) and designed by Sir William Chambers (d.1796), architect to King George III for Gower House, adjoining the Royal Banqueting House, Whitehall. It was designed for the Great Saloon or room-of-entertainment on the first floor. It was one of a pair that accompanied the end-mirrors. The latter's arched crestings corresponded to that of the central Venetian window overlooking Whitehall. Chambers' design for the room is now in Sir John Soane's Museum. The room was French-panelled with paired pilasters painted with medallions by Giovanni Battista Cipriani (d.1788) that were set in stuccoed arabesques issuing from veil-festooned urns. The friezes of the pedimented door entablatures were enriched with medallion-heads set in acanthus ribbon-guilloche and flanked wine-krater urns. The table's elliptic corners between paired columns, harmonised with the forms of the elliptic-angled apse at one end of the room. Its frieze, carved with Grecian ribbon-fret guilloche, is applied with antique-fluted tablets above the legs; and while the centre, which would have housed a wine-cistern, is left undecorated, the angles display richly decorated aprons with acanthus-guilloche corresponding to the door entablatures. Appropriate for a table intended to display gold plate this guilloche is centred by vases. One, with straight-headed handles corresponding to those of the doors, is flanked by veil-draped urns issuing from acanthus, in the manner of those on the wall-pilasters. The table's fluted columnar legs are embellished with a band of ribbon-tied veil-drapery beneath the hollowed and strigil-fluted capitals, and with a band of laurel-leaves above the bolt-shaped feet. The general form of these legs relates to that of a chair which Chambers sketched while in Paris in the 1740s and used as inspiration for his design of the Royal Society of Arts' president's chair.
This table relates closely in form to a set of three tables, bearing Royal inventory brands. One of a pair is in the Metropolitan Museum and and the other is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The third was sold anonymously, Christie's New York, 17 October 1985. All these are thought to have been designed by Chambers in the 1760's for George III's Buckingham House, now Palace.
The elegant Franco-Italian design of this table demonstarets the influence that the French architect Le Geay had on Chambers while he was studying in Rome in the early 1750s. It also supports Chambers' personal claim to be have been a 'Very pretty connoisseur in furniture'. The specialist carver Sefferin Alken (d.1783) of Broad Street, Golden Square, who worked with Chambers on a number of important commissions, may have been responsible for the fine carving on this table (see: The Dictionary of English Furniture-Makers, Leeds, 1986, p.8)