.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This tea-table is designed in the elegant George III French antique fashion adopted around 1770, and is ornamented to evoke ancient festivities and the triumph of Apollo as poetry and sun deity. A flowered ribbon-guilloche wreathes its bow-serpentined top, while laurels issue from the flowered volutes and 'Venus' shell-enriched capitals of the legs. A sunflowered patera, recalling Ovid's Metamorphoses and the history of Apollo and his love Clytie, embellishes its bow-aproned frieze, whose antique flutes recall Rome's Temple of Antinous and Faustina (Desgodetz, Les Edifices Antiques de Rome, Paris, 1682, pl. 111) Its French-fashioned truss-scrolled legs are hollow-fluted and reed-banded in the manner of a Louis XV 'cabriolet' chair pattern that was issued as 'Modern' in 1775 in T. Malton's, Compleat Treatise on Perspective, 1755, pl. XXXIII, fig. 131.
Many fine pieces of mid-18th Century case furniture, and particularly card-tables, have 'H. TIBATS' stamped on their concertina-action hinges, including a card-table in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tibats was clearly an important source of iron fittings and was probably based in London or Birmingham (P. Thornton, 'A Signed Hinge', Furniture History, 1966, pp. 44-45, pl. XXIII).
A card-table of exactly this design is illustrated in J. Rogers, English Furniture, revised and enlarged edition by M. Jourdain, London, 1929, fig. 177. Although the dimensions are given as slightly different (2ft. 6 in. high; 3ft wide - which is very slightly higher and narrower than this table), it does seem possible that there were small measuring differences and that the Rogers table, then in the possession of the dealer Leonard Knight, was the pair to this one. It is also just possible that it is one and the same table and that Rogers described it as a card-table without having seen that it has a veneered interior.
A pair of very closely related tables with a plainer line on the apron, formerly in the Moller collection, were sold in these Rooms, 29 November 2002, lot 102.
Lot 90 in this sale was also in the collection of Thomas Inman.
Many fine pieces of mid-18th Century case furniture, and particularly card-tables, have 'H. TIBATS' stamped on their concertina-action hinges, including a card-table in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tibats was clearly an important source of iron fittings and was probably based in London or Birmingham (P. Thornton, 'A Signed Hinge', Furniture History, 1966, pp. 44-45, pl. XXIII).
A card-table of exactly this design is illustrated in J. Rogers, English Furniture, revised and enlarged edition by M. Jourdain, London, 1929, fig. 177. Although the dimensions are given as slightly different (2ft. 6 in. high; 3ft wide - which is very slightly higher and narrower than this table), it does seem possible that there were small measuring differences and that the Rogers table, then in the possession of the dealer Leonard Knight, was the pair to this one. It is also just possible that it is one and the same table and that Rogers described it as a card-table without having seen that it has a veneered interior.
A pair of very closely related tables with a plainer line on the apron, formerly in the Moller collection, were sold in these Rooms, 29 November 2002, lot 102.
Lot 90 in this sale was also in the collection of Thomas Inman.