拍品專文
The George III Pembroke table's flower-inlaid medallion of Roman foliage relates to a pattern featured is Messrs A.Hepplewhite & Co.'s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide, 1788, pl.63, and evolved from the Apollonian sunflower trophy popularised by Robert Wood's 1753 publication of the sun-and poetry deity's Palmyreen temple. Its tablet border is wreathed by a flowered ribbon-guilloche, whose scrolls reflect the ornamental borders of Etruscan vases later considered appropriate for Roman columbarium (vase-chamber) reception dressing-rooms popularised from the mid-1770s by The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam. The court Japanner Henry Clay of Covent Garden for instance introduced a similar border on an early 1770s Pembroke table supplied for Osterley, Middlesex (M. Tomlin, Catalogue of Adam Period Furniture, London, 1982, J/5). As became popular in the 1780s, this table was supplied en suite with a pair of elliptic window-pier tables, concealing card-tables beneath folding tops (sold anonymously, Christie's, New York, 17 October 2003, lot 169 ($10,158)). On account of its close relationship to an elliptic and flower-marquetried pier table supplied in 1784 for Langley's, Essex, it can be attributed to the court cabinet-maker Charles Elliott, who traded from New Bond Street from the early 1780s until 1806 (E.T. Joy, 'Charles Elliott, Royal Cabinet-maker', Connoisseur, June 1959, p. 36, fig. 5).