LATE 18TH CENTURY

The table with its distinctive border of peacock feathers relates to the extensive suite of seat furniture and fire screens supplied to D. Tupper Esq. of Hauteville House, Guernsey in 1790 by Seddon, Sons & Shackleton of Aldersgate Street, London (E.F. Strange, 'Seddon Furniture', Old Furniture, vol. 5, September-December 1928, pp. 118-120). The decoration was described as 'neatly Japanned-ornamented with roses in back (of the seat furniture) and peacock feather border'. Two of the window seats from the set were illustrated in A Catalogue and Index of Old Furniture and Works of Decorative Art, M. Harris & Sons, Part III, p. 377, and a chair from the same set is in the Victoria & Albert Museum (W.2:1-1968), illustrated in Ralph Edwards, English Chairs, London, 1965, pl.104. Another window seat, possibly from the same suite, was sold by the Earl of Dudley, Christie's, London, May 23 2013, lot 227.

Another house associated with peacock-feather decorated furniture is Daylesford, Gloucestershire. A Louis XVI style bed with frame and columnar pillars wreathed by 'Juno' peacock feathers was commissioned circa 1790 from the Soho firm of Mayhew & Ince by Warren Hastings (d.1818), the celebrated statesman and former Governor-General of Bengal. At the 1853 Daylesford sale, held on the death of Warren Hastings's step-son, Sir Charles Imhoff, the Hastings 'peacock' bed (lot 321) was purchased, together with other 'Peacock' furnishings from the Peacock Room at Daylesford, by the Wardour Street dealer Louis Nathan and acquired for Sandon Park (L. Boynton, 'The Furniture of Warren Hastings', Burlington Magazine, August 1970, pp. 509-520).