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Lot Essay
This sumptuous table, with its intricately relief-carved top and figural supports, is clearly inspired by the extraordinary silver furniture created for many of the royal and princely courts of Northern Europe at the end of the 17th Century. Like the table offered here, many of these silver tables were made en suite with torcheres to be placed in front of a mirror, either for intimate bedroom apartments or as part of a series to be displayed in an enfilade in more public rooms.
A silver table featuring figural uprights, similar strapwork stretchers and an engraved top was supplied in 1699 by Andrew Moore to William III and is now in Windsor Castle, while silversmiths such as Claude Ballin at the court of Louis XIV supplied designs for similar tables to be executed in silver (see C. Arminjon, Quand Versailles Était Meublé d'Argent, exh. cat., Paris, 2007, p. 194, fig. 183 and p. 46, fig. 29). The taste for silver furniture was particularly pronounced at the German princely courts, notably Augsburg, which had long been a celebrated center for craftsmen in metal and whose silversmiths supplied many of the other courts of Europe (see Arminjon, op. cit., pp. 85-99).
A silver table featuring figural uprights, similar strapwork stretchers and an engraved top was supplied in 1699 by Andrew Moore to William III and is now in Windsor Castle, while silversmiths such as Claude Ballin at the court of Louis XIV supplied designs for similar tables to be executed in silver (see C. Arminjon, Quand Versailles Était Meublé d'Argent, exh. cat., Paris, 2007, p. 194, fig. 183 and p. 46, fig. 29). The taste for silver furniture was particularly pronounced at the German princely courts, notably Augsburg, which had long been a celebrated center for craftsmen in metal and whose silversmiths supplied many of the other courts of Europe (see Arminjon, op. cit., pp. 85-99).