Intended to accompany the fashionable Grecian sofa of the early 19th Century drawing-room, this rosewood table's architecture and fine black-figured veneer with gilt enrichments also relects the contemporary Grecian or French antique fashion. It celebrates lyric poetry with its wreath of triumphal palms and the poet's laurel-crown displayed on its frieze tablet while winged griffin monopodia, sacred to the poetry deity Apollo, support its flowered and plinth-supported pilasters, which are buttressed by Roman acanthus. Such mythical griffin monopodia featured on the French-fashioned drawing-room table introduced around 1800 at his Duchess Street mansion museum by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d. 1842) and illustrated in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807 (pl. 15, no. 4). George Smith, 'Upholder' to George, Prince of Wales, illustrated an 1804 sofa table design with related trestles, in his Collection of Designs for Household Furniture, 1808 (pl. 84).

A smaller table of this basic pattern was sold anonymously, Christie's South Kensington, 3 February 1999, lot 181.