POSSIBLY BY MARSH AND TATHAM, CIRCA 1805

These lion monopodia tables are executed in 'antique' fashion promoted the architect Charles Heathcote Tatham (d. 1842). The lion monopodia derive from marble antiquities such as those in Tatham's own collection that he assembled during his studies in Rome in the mid-1790s and illustrated in his Etchings of Grecian and Roman Architectural Ornament, of 1806. Tatham's drawings were used as a design source for fashionable furniture produced at the time. Plate 2 of the Etchings, provided the prototype for sideboard-tables now displayed in the Parlour of The Sir John Soane Museum, and supplied for Southill, Bedfordshire, by the Mount Street cabinet-makers William Marsh and Thomas Tatham, brother of the architect (see G. Jackson-Stops, 'Southill Park', Country Life, 28 April 1994, pp. 63-64).

An impressive set of eighteen dining chairs by Marsh and Tatham, supplied for the 2nd Earl Talbot of Hensol (d. 1849) at Ingestre Hall, Staffordshire, are carved with remarkably similar lion mask mounts. The Talbot chairs (sold Christie's London, 7 June 2007, lot 100) follow a design published by Thomas Sheraton in 1804. Marsh and Tatham (and Ingestre's architect John Nash) were working contemporaneously for George IV, and at Caledon, co. Tyron under the patronage of the 2nd Baron Caledon.