This elegant Grecian-black, brass-inlaid and ormolu-enriched desk is conceived in the French/antique manner promoted in France by La Mesangère's Journal et Objets de Gout, 1802-1835 and in England by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d. 1842). The palm-flowered trusses of its laurel-wreathed composite pillars, as well as its Roman-lamp 'claws' or lion-monopodia, derive from patterns in Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1807 (pls. XIV and L). Its pillars also relate to patterns for 'Tripod Stands for Work Tables, Screen & Candelbri' and for 'Tea Poys' published in George Smith's Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1808 (pls. 111 and 79). Its sloping desk corresponds to that of the 'Davenport' invented around 1800 and described as a 'drawing-room writing-table used by ladies' in J. Loudon's Encyclopedia, 1833. The desk relates to ebony furnishings, such as the column-fronted cabinets, introduced by the Francophile Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh (d. 1846) at Uppark, Sussex, following the period that the architect John Adey Repton (d. 1860) aggrandised the house in the second decade of the 19th Century (illustrated in a photograph of the dining-room taken in 1910 which is published in C. Rowell, Uppark, London, 1995, p. 50). Other column-fronted furniture, featuring the same patterned ormolu capitals, have been documented as bearing the stamp of S. Jamar, who in 1818 was trading in Wardour Street and claimed his furniture was 'equal to any made in Paris' (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700-1840, Leeds, 1996, p. 35 and figs. 509, 513 and 519).