Lot Essay
The pair of marble-topped sideboard-tables are designed in the George II 'Roman' fashion with palm-and-acanthus wrapped cornices above antique-fluted friezes that are banded by flowered-ribbon moldings. Their acanthus-clasp cartouches display the shell badge of the nature-deity Venus garlanded by Jupiter's sacred oak that festoon from the flowered volutes of the truss-scrolled and patera-imbricated pilasters terminating in bacchic lion-paws. Such paws feature on a table-frame pattern in B.Langley's Treasury of Designs, 1745 (pl. 155)
The principal inspiration for these tables would appear to be a celebrated table that formed part of the furnishings supplied to Sir Robert Walpole for the rooms at Houghton Hall, Norfolk that were decorated under the guidance of the Rome-trained artist William Kent (d. 1748), while related cartouches featured on tables formerly in the H. Mulliner collection (F. Lenygon, Furniture in England, 1914, fig. 213).