ATTRIBUTED TO MAYHEW AND INCE, THE TOP ATTRIBUTED TO DOMINIC BARTOLI, CIRCA 1770

The golden table, designed for candelabra display and en suite with a pier-glass, is designed in the elegant George III French antique fashion of the 1770s. Its bas-relief frieze is wreathed by palm-flowered libation-paterae in a ribbon guilloche and banded by an Etruscan-fashioned 'Venus' pearl-string; while more pearls wreath the palm-wrapped, antique-fluted and herm-tapered columnar legs. These legs are paired in 1760s 'sideboard-table' fashion as intended for the display of ewers and central wine-cistern. Their urn-like capitals are altar-hollowed and embellished with ribbon-guilloches in central 'tablets'. Their design echoes that of the marble top, whose scagliola recalls marble-mosaiced slabs in 'Roman pavement' fashion like the Eating Room pier-tables with 'Antique marble Slabs' executed for Osterley Park, Middlesex after Robert Adam's 1767 'sideboard-table' design (E. Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam, London, 2001, p.162, figs. 233 and 231). In the same year Adam designed related table frames, incorporating carved vases in its stretcher, that were intended to support 'tables of Scagliola' supplied by Messrs Bartoli & Richter for Coventry House, London (ibid, p.58, fig. 83). The latter were invoiced in 1768 at the same time as the specialist carver Sefferin Alken invoiced his work. In 1773, Adam executed a design for the related pier-table, dressed with large vases standing underneath, that was executed for the Drawing Room at Northumberland House,ibid., p.98, fig.146). The table, whose top was described as a 'superb Mosaic Slab' had palm-wrapped and fluted legs that related to those of the apartment's seat-furniture, which was supplied by the Soho 'Upholder' James Cullen. A similar pier-table frame, also with palm-flowered ribbon-guiloche and palm-wrapped legs, was supplied for a mosaiced and Etruscan black marble slab that was displayed in Adam's celebrated tapestry room at Croome Court, Worcestershire, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This was invoiced in 1794 by the Soho cabinet-makers John Mayhew and William Ince as: 'a large Frame for a Marble Slab, enrich'd with patteras etc. on turned legs, neatly carved and the whole gilt in burnished gold £17 10 s.' (J.P. O'’Neil, ed., Period Rooms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,1996, p. 165.). The present table-frame can also be attributed to Messrs Mayhew and Ince. The white marble top is banded by a polychromed and flowered ribbon-fret in the George III Roman fashion. Intended to symbolise the virtue of 'faithfulness', its golden fretted ribbon is entwined by blue convolvulus flowers that forms festive beribboned wreaths at the centres and corners.
Related beribboned vines featured in a design for a chimney-piece designed by Timothy Lightoler for Burton Constable, Yorkshire, but whose pattern was changed to oak when executed by the Italian 'Inlayer in Marble and Stucco-work' Domenico Bartoli, who was also much employed by the architect Robert Adam (d.1792). However, the ribbon and leaf design seen on the present table-top was Bartoli's own invention, suggesting this top may be by him alone. His firm was employed too in the early 1780s at the Carlton House palace of George, Prince of Wales, later George IV, and as late as 1805 Bartoli was still petitioning the Prince for payment of £84 for related table tops described as, 'two Scagliola Tables inlaid with foliage and [antique] ornament'.