This multi-purpose table, of a type introduced to fashionable bedroom apartments in the 1760s, has fluted herm legs in the antique manner and its top inlaid in the French manner with a paper accompanying a book that overlays embroidery equipment comprising a needlework pouch, scissors, thimble and a shuttle. By tradition the table has descended through the Strickland family, of Sizergh Castle, Westmorland. The ancient castle is celebrated in particular for an inlay-panelled bedroom apartment illustrated in J. Nash's, Mansions of England, vol. IV, 1849, (pl. 9) and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. There is a good possibility that this table, with its novel inlay, was commissioned by Cecilia Strickland (d. 1807), who in 1762 married Charles Strickland (d. 1770) and was the heiress of the Townleys of Standish and Borwick. The popularity of such marquetry trophies was promoted in London in the 1760s by specialist inlayers such as Christopher Fuhrlohg (d. c. 1790) of Tottenham Court Road.