This lobed table inlaid with etched brass shells is typically associated with the work of John Channon of Exeter and London, who supplied the celebrated pair of monumental bookcases to Sir William Courtenay for Powderham Castle, Devonshire in 1740. The fashion for 'boulle' type inlay was inspired by Continental prototypes and a wealth of Continental design sources were available to London cabinetmakers, including Gaetano Brunetti's Sixty Different Sorts of Ornaments (1736) and P. Babel's A New Book of Ornaments (1752). German cabinetmakers, such as Abraham Roentgen and Johann Friedrich Hintz, were attracted to London with the ascent of the George I in 1727, and produced similar brass-inlaid furniture.

Twenty-five 'pillar and claw' tables of brass-inlaid lobed design have been recorded to date (see C. Gilbert and T. Murdoch, 'Channon Revisited' F.H.S.J., 1994, p. 75). The only maker known with certainty to have produced such tables is Hintz, who in 1738 advertised a sale of 'A Choice Tea-Boards, etc. all curiously made and inlaid with fine Figures of Brass and Mother of Pearl' (C. Gilbert and T. Murdoch, John Channon and Brass-Inlaid Furniture 1730-1760, 1993, p. 136).

A virtually identical table from the collection of A. Chester Beatty, Sr., Kensington Palace Gardens, London, was sold by Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 29-30 April 1960, lot 229 (illustrated in C. Claxton Stevens and S. Whittington, Eighteenth Century English Furniture: The Norman Adams Collection, 1983, pp. 288-289.