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Lot Essay
This impressive sideboard-table is designed in the early 19th century 'antique' fashion with caryatic pilasters comprising chimerical griffin. These eagle-winged lions were imagined by the poets as sacred to Apollo, the sun and hunter deity and leader of the Muses of Artistic inspiration. Its robust architecture reflects the antique style promoted in the furnishings of Carlton House by George, Prince of Wales, later George IV. In the mid-1790s, the architect Charles Heathcote Tatham (d.1842) visited Rome to gain inspiration for the Palace's embellishment, and brought back a marble antiquity comprised of a griffin-carved 'sarcophagus' trestle, which he first sketched in 1796. In 1816 this was acquired by the architect Sir John Soane and illustrated in a watercolour made of his London study the following year (C. H. Tatham, Etchings representing Fragments of Grecian and Roman architectural ornaments, 1806; P. Thornton and H. Dorey, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1992, fig. 16; and C. Proudfoot and D.Watkin, 'The Furniture of C.H. Tatham', Country Life, 8 June 1972, pp. 428, fig. 1). The same pattern of bronze medallions featured in a frame designed by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d.1831) for an enamel tablet depicting Venus and Cupid. The Hope medallions are likely to have been executed by the Piccadilly bronze founder Alexis Decaix (T. Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pl. 27, no. 2). The same griffin sculptures, japanned in imitation bronze, feature on related sideboard-tables executed for Bretton Park, Yorkshire following its aggrandisement in the second decade of the 19th century by the architect Jeffry Wyatt (one illustrated in situ in A. Oswald, 'Bretton Park-II', Country Life, 28 May 1938, p. 558, fig. 10; its companion was sold 9 June 1947, lot 140 and acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969 [W.26]). An almost identical sideboard is illustrated in Margaret Jourdain, Regency Furniture 1795-1830, London, 1965, p. 85, fig. 203.
The Ellison family was the leading banker in Lincoln. Sudbrooke Holme, on the main Lincoln to Wragby road, was demolished in 1951.
The Ellison family was the leading banker in Lincoln. Sudbrooke Holme, on the main Lincoln to Wragby road, was demolished in 1951.