CIRCA 1755-60, POSSIBLY SCOTTISH

This elegant table, with its frieze of repeating Greek key beneath a lip of Ionic egg-and-dart and above a scrolled ribbon-and-rosette lower edge, is designed in the George II ‘Roman’ fashion. The overall form, with carved frieze, straight leg and angle brackets, is clearly inspired by Thomas Chippendale’s 1753 pattern for a sideboard table, first published in his The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, 1754 (pl. XXXVI). It is most closely related to a pair of side tables formerly in the collection of the Earls of Haddington, at Tyninghame, East Lothian (sold Sotheby's house sale, 28 September 1987, lot 15). The Tyninghame tables differ only very slightly in the piercing of the brackets, the fluting of the legs and design of the feet. Interestingly, the Haddington collection also included a pair of pot cupboards en suite (lot 18), which were also sold from the Dining Room in the 1987 house sale. A further Scottish table, which has the same upper and lower carved details to the frieze, though with a Vitruvian scroll rather than a Greek key pattern, as well as different scrolling brackets and plain legs, formerly belonged to the Rose family of Kilravock Castle, Inverness-shire (sold Michael Lipitch II, Christie’s London, 4 October 2001, lot 112, £42,300). The similarities between the present table and both the Tyninghame and Kilravock tables possibly points towards Scottish authorship. Interestingly, the Edinburgh 'wright' Alexander Peter is known to have copied and adapted Chippendale's designs, such as the mahogany sideboard table he supplied to William, 5th Earl of Dumfries for the Pink Dining Room at Dumfries House, Ayrshire, in 1759 (see Christie's London sale catalogue, 12 July 2007, Dumfries House: A Chippendale Commission, vol. I, lot 71).