CIRCA 1790

The extraordinary legs on this table recall Thomas Chippendale’s 1772 design for a tea table at Harewood House, Yorkshire intended for execution by local cabinet-makers (reproduced in C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, fig. 467). The overlapping disk design is a prevailing feature on the most sophisticated commissions of the late 1760s and 1770s, including Sir Lawrence Dundas’s Moor Park tapestry room suite (C. Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall, London, 1978, vol. I, no. 46, pp. 63-67) and the Duke of Northumberland’s Syon House drawing room tables (E. Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors, New Haven, 2001, p. 186, fig. 275). Despite these earlier design features, the table’s original Bramah locks indicate that it was made sometime between 1784, when the company was founded, and the late 1790s. Thomas Chippendale Jr., who carried on the business following his father’s death in 1779, continued many of the styles and techniques used by his father with whom he had worked for over a dozen years. He employed the overlapping disk design as late as 1804 on a corner table supplied for Stourhead, Wiltshire (J. Goodison, ‘Thomas Chippendale the Younger at Stourhead’, Furniture History, 2005 , pp. 59-60, fig. 28). While very little is known about him, it is plausible that he could have produced a library rent table of this refinement.

A comparable table with the same profile molding to the legs was sold from Simon Sainsbury: The Creation of an English Arcadia, Christie’s, London, 18 June 2008,lot 245 (£73,250).