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拍品專文
Designed to accompany the fireside Grecian sofas that were introduced to the fashionable drawing room living room around 1800, this table would have been provided en suite with a pair of pier card-tables and a central 'loo' table (see lot 48), such as featured in Thomas Sheraton's Encyclopaedia, 1804 (pl. 40).
The circular 'loo' table is conceived as an altar, dedicated to the poetry deity Apollo, with its Grecian stepped and palm-wrapped pillar supported by golden monopodia comprised of winged paws of the chimerical griffin, sacred to Apollo. Like the 'loo' or games-table this sofa table's richly figured top is wreathed with a black-bordered ribbon of golden 'poetic' myrtle in the Louis Quatorze 'boulle' fashion promoted by George Bullock (d. 1818) at his Grecian Rooms in Piccadilly and later at his Tenterden Street premises (C. Wainwright et al., George Bullock, Cabinetmaker, London, 1988). Its truss-buttressed pilasters relate in particular to a table pattern in George Smith's Collection of Designs for Household Furniture, 1808 (pl. 70).
This table and the previous lot both come from the same house in Ireland. One of the greatest suites of early 19th Century furniture is also found in an Irish house - that at Castle Coole, Co. Fermanagh. The Castle Coole furniture was supplied under the direction of the Dublin upholsterers, John and Nathaniel Preston for the 2nd Earl of Belmore (see H. Montgomery-Massingberd and C. Simon Sykes, Great Houses of Ireland, London, 1999, pp. 230 and 241).
The circular 'loo' table is conceived as an altar, dedicated to the poetry deity Apollo, with its Grecian stepped and palm-wrapped pillar supported by golden monopodia comprised of winged paws of the chimerical griffin, sacred to Apollo. Like the 'loo' or games-table this sofa table's richly figured top is wreathed with a black-bordered ribbon of golden 'poetic' myrtle in the Louis Quatorze 'boulle' fashion promoted by George Bullock (d. 1818) at his Grecian Rooms in Piccadilly and later at his Tenterden Street premises (C. Wainwright et al., George Bullock, Cabinetmaker, London, 1988). Its truss-buttressed pilasters relate in particular to a table pattern in George Smith's Collection of Designs for Household Furniture, 1808 (pl. 70).
This table and the previous lot both come from the same house in Ireland. One of the greatest suites of early 19th Century furniture is also found in an Irish house - that at Castle Coole, Co. Fermanagh. The Castle Coole furniture was supplied under the direction of the Dublin upholsterers, John and Nathaniel Preston for the 2nd Earl of Belmore (see H. Montgomery-Massingberd and C. Simon Sykes, Great Houses of Ireland, London, 1999, pp. 230 and 241).