POSSIBLY IRISH, MID-19TH CENTURY

The Florentine table-top has a golden-flecked portor marble border and displays a pietre dure medallion of a staff-bearing shepherd within a white marble ring that is sprigged with fruit and flowers interspersed with butterflies. The fashion for such figurative medallions had been introduced in Florence in the late eighteenth century, and this one bears the Latin name of the ancient city of Carthage, which had been the scene of Rome's Punic Wars before its destruction by the Saracens. Its reed-gadrooned table-frame is supported on a pillar and tripod 'claw', that are richly carved with bubbled ribbon-guilloche, Roman acanthus and Jupiter's eagle-claws in the William IV 'antique' fashion popularised by Thomas King's, Specimens of Furniture in the Elizabethan and Louis Quatorze Styles, 1835.
The same figure appears in the centre of a circular table illustrated in E. T. Joy's, English Furniture 1800-1850, London 1977, p. 284.