18TH CENTURY

The form of the present table, with its shaped aprons, elaborate spandrels, mid-leg ‘barbed leaf’ carving and ruyi-form feet is a particularly archaic one, derived from the open-panel box construction developed as early as the Tang dynasty. Several small wine tables with such features can be seen in the Song-dynasty painting album, Tianlai ge jiucang Songren huace, part of which is illustrated in Wang Shixiang’s Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture, vol. I, Hong Kong, 1990, p. 55, fig. 2.20. An example in tielimu illustrated by Wang Shixiang in ibid., vol. II, p. 78, no. B36, although both lack the everted ends.

A few extant examples of this form are known, including one at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, illustrated by Roger Ward and Patricia Fidler in The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, New York, 1993, p. 342. For a huanghuali example with everted ends and very similar mid-leg ‘barbed-leaf’ carvings in the Royal Ontario Museum, see R. Ellsworth, Chinese Furniture: Hardwood Examples of the Ming and Early Ch’ing Dynasties, New Fairfield, Connecticut, 1970, no. 53.