MID-18TH CENTURY

The 'console' frame for the marble pier table top is richly serpentined with voluted ribbon-scrolls in the French 'picturesque' manner, as featured in 'Marble Table' patterns issued in Batty Langley's The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1740 and borrowed from patterns by the French sculptor, N. Pineau (d. 1754). Its frieze displays a large Roman acanthus flower within an open cartouche, while its trussed-pilasters legs are comprised of addorsed scrolls lapped by foliage and watery scallops and terminating in foliated volutes. Its design relates in particular to a pattern featured in Matthias Lock's Six Tables, 1746 (pl. 5 left side). The table frame, intended to accompany a window-pier mirror, also issues water-drips that evoke dragon-inhabited grottoes, in keeping with Chinese vases that would dress it, both on top and underneath. Its superb carving and composition is also comparable to a Lock designed chair in the Victoria and Albert Museum that featured in portraits by Richard Cosway (d. 1821) as well as to a magnificent bed probably designed by Lock at Hopetoun House, Scotland (M. Snodin et al., Rococo, Art and Design in Hogarth's England, London, 1984, pp. 169-170, cat. no. L25 and A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, 1968, fig. 413). Matthias Lock (d. 1765), carver and author of various pattern books, was reputed by his contemporaries to be 'the best Draftsman in that way [ie. the French picturesque manner] that had ever been in England'.
The table is likely to have been commissioned by Robert Darcy, 4th Earl of Holdernesse (1718-1777), a Lord of George II's Bedchamber and his Secretary of State in 1751-1754. It is similar in quality to another marble-topped table illustrated at Hornby Castle in P. Macquoid's, 'Furniture at Hornby Castle', Country Life, 30 March 1912, p. 476, fig. 4. It may well be the 'carved bronzed & gilt pier table with statuary marble top' that appears in the 1839 inventory of Hornby Castle, recorded in the Study.