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Lot Essay
Half-round tables are recorded in the Ming carpenter's manuals, Lu Ban Jing, suggesting they were once more common than the few surviving examples would seem to indicate. A demi-lune table and two outline drawings are illustated by Wang Shixiang, Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture, vol. II, p. 118, B125-B127.
Thought to be made in pairs, demi-lune tables were designed to be pushed together to form a single round table. The half-width of the rear legs of the present table suggests this table would have been made as one of a pair. When matched with its mate, the table's half legs would appear to be a single leg. There are no known extant pairs of demi-lune tables, dating to the 16th-17th century, and even single tables such as the present example are quite rare.
The use of supporting cross stretchers appears to be quite rare and only one other published example, illustrated by M. Flacks, Classical Chinese Furniture: a very personal point of view, London, 2011, pp. 248-51, also has this very unusual construction. Most published examples, such as a demi-lune table in the collection of Messrs. Robert and William Drummond, illustrated by G. Ecke, Domestic Chinese Furniture, Rutland and Tokyo, 1962, p. 72, fig. 55, are shown with shaped aprons. See, also, another huanghuali demi-lune example illustrated by Grace Wu Bruce, Living With Ming – The Lu Ming Shi Collection, Phillipe de Backer, 2000, p. 112, pl. 22, and one sold at Christie's New York, 18 September 1997, lot 33, from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Piccus Collection.
Thought to be made in pairs, demi-lune tables were designed to be pushed together to form a single round table. The half-width of the rear legs of the present table suggests this table would have been made as one of a pair. When matched with its mate, the table's half legs would appear to be a single leg. There are no known extant pairs of demi-lune tables, dating to the 16th-17th century, and even single tables such as the present example are quite rare.
The use of supporting cross stretchers appears to be quite rare and only one other published example, illustrated by M. Flacks, Classical Chinese Furniture: a very personal point of view, London, 2011, pp. 248-51, also has this very unusual construction. Most published examples, such as a demi-lune table in the collection of Messrs. Robert and William Drummond, illustrated by G. Ecke, Domestic Chinese Furniture, Rutland and Tokyo, 1962, p. 72, fig. 55, are shown with shaped aprons. See, also, another huanghuali demi-lune example illustrated by Grace Wu Bruce, Living With Ming – The Lu Ming Shi Collection, Phillipe de Backer, 2000, p. 112, pl. 22, and one sold at Christie's New York, 18 September 1997, lot 33, from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Piccus Collection.