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Lot Essay
This card-table, with gracefully-shaped apron centred by a scallop shell, the badge of Venus, goddess of love, is a superb example of mid-18th century Irish craftsmanship. The ground of the apron is pounced like contemporary gilt-gesso work and the Bacchic lion-paw feet are squared in the Irish manner below carved fetlocks, another Irish characteristic. Like many Irish tables of the same period, it has no frieze and the top sits directly on the apron, such as a similar card-table in the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, Dublin (no. 1911.532). There is a side table with a very similar apron and probably by the same cabinet-maker in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, U.S.A. (see forthcoming book on Irish furniture by The Knight of Glin and James Peill).
An inventory of Lawrence Delamain's house in Cork, taken in 1763, lists in the front parlour a mahogany dining-table, a marble table, a card table, chairs with leather seats and brass fittings for wall lights, all no doubt designed to impress his clientele as he was a teacher of dancing (T. Barnard, Making the Grand Figure, Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641-1770, London, 2004, p. 112).
An inventory of Lawrence Delamain's house in Cork, taken in 1763, lists in the front parlour a mahogany dining-table, a marble table, a card table, chairs with leather seats and brass fittings for wall lights, all no doubt designed to impress his clientele as he was a teacher of dancing (T. Barnard, Making the Grand Figure, Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641-1770, London, 2004, p. 112).