CIRCA 1825

The beautiful slab of granite is displayed on a sideboard-table, whose palm-flowered pilasters of caryatic 'Apollo' griffin or chimerical winged-lion monopodia relate to a 'sideboard leg' pattern issued in George Smith's Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1808, pl. 91. Smith's pattern in turn derives from the French/antique fashion popularised by Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, issued in 1807 as a guide to his Duchess Street mansion/museum by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d. 1831). Such robust furniture also reflects the fashion promoted by Hope's Rome-trained architect Charles Heathcote Tatham (d. 1842), through his publication of 'Etchings representing Fragments of Antique Grecian and Roman Architectural Ornament chiefly collected in Italy [in the 1790s]', London, 1806. Tatham's contemporary work for his Yorkshire patron Frederick, 5th Earl of Carlisle included similar griffin sideboard-tables in the great room of entertainment or Gallery at Castle Howard (see C. Tatham, Plan and Section of the gallery at Castle Howard, 1811).