CIRCA 1820

The library sofa writing-table, featuring Grecian Egyptian elements is conceived in the French antique fashion promoted by the connoisseur Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807. Grecian-black Egyptian reeds band its cut-cornered tablet of marbled and black-figured rosewood, as well as the castor-concealing plinths of its sloped 'altar' pillars. The latter's form relates, for instance, to a Hope pedestal pattern, but lacks the latter's sculpted tripod element of 'Apollo' griffin (ibid., pl. 24). Its robust form typifies the Tenterden Street furniture manufactured by the Liverpool and London cabinet-maker George Bullock (d. 1818), one of whose 'Egyptian' furnishing patterns would appear to be that later published in December 1822 in Rudolph Ackermann's Repository of Arts (pl. 129).