EARLY 19TH CENTURY

This elegant table, designed in the early 19th century French Grecian fashion for a Drawing Room window-pier, has its baize-lined games table and a hollowed 'well' concealed beneath a its hinged and turning top. The latter has its exotic veneer of silken-figured satinwood framed in Grecian tablets inlaid in Louis Quatorze 'boulle' manner with ebony ribbon-fillets serving as trompe l'oeil antique 'bronze' tablet frames, which are fretted with poetic laurels issuing from the Ionic volutes at the columnar corners, whose frieze tablets are flowered with Apollonian palms. While golden palms flower the Grecian-scrolled 'claws', which provide altar-plinths for trestles resembling Grecian lyres, comprised of spindled Pompeian pillars wreathed in bronzed 'Pan' reeds. The table is likely to have accompanied a Grecian sofa-table, such as the table of similar architectural form supplied for Ham House, Surrey to contain a Broadwood pianoforte made in 1801 (P. Thornton, 'The Furnishing and Decoration of Ham House', Furniture History, 1980, fig. 193). A related table, but with different supports, was supplied in 1810 for Papworth Hall, Cambridgeshire by the Bond Street cabinet-maker George Oakley (d.1840), who was celebrated in 1801 'as being the most tasteful of the London cabinet makers' (Journal de Luxus und der Moden, Weimar, 1801; and M. Jourdain, Regency Furniture, London, 1965, rev. ed., p. 109). Oakley, who specialised in Grecian style furniture with 'buhl' inlay, had received a royal appointment following a visit from Queen Charlotte in 1799.