RECONSTRUCTED FROM A LARGER PIECE OF FURNITURE, PROBABLY IN THE 19TH CENTURY

The pedestals, designed in the George II 'Roman' manner promoted as the British style by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, display trophies celebrating the 'Water' Element. These festive trophies comprise 'Venus' shell badges that are associated with the Nature deity's water birth, and are supported by entwined dolphins. According to the mythology of ancient poets, the latter drew Venus's triumphal shell carriage to land, where flowers sprang at the touch of her foot. The pedestals also recall ancient bacchic festivities being flowered with beribboned Roman acanthus issuing festoons of husks, as featured in a pedestal pattern in James Gibbs' Book of Architecture, 1728, pl. 150. Their moulded plinths may have matched the room's skirting-board, and are wreathed by beribboned laurels beneath acanthus ribbon-guilloches tied by pearled reeds.
During the 1730s, embowed dolphins which featured in Renaissance fountains, were introduced as console-trusses for 'Roman' style marble-topped tables by Lord Burlington's protogés, such as the court architect William Kent (d.1748). These sideboard-pedestals are reputed to have come from Devonshire House, Piccadilly the London mansion built in 1733 by the 3rd Duke of Devonshire and decorated under the direction of William Kent. The house was sold by the 8th Duke of Devonshire in 1920 and demolished five years later.