The elegant sideboard-table, displaying a palm-flowered frieze tablet of a shell-clasped spray of Roman foliage in palm-flower form, in a ribbon-guilloche of antique flutes, was probably designed for Daniel Lascelles (d. 1784) of Goldsborough Hall, Yorkshire, by the St. Martin's Lane firm of Thomas Chippendale (d. 1779), and harmonised with the 'Roman' ornament of the dining-room designed in the 1760s by Thomas Carr (d. 1807), Yorkshire's principal architect. Its sun-flowered and pearl-wreathed libation-paterae and its hermed legs, hollowed in fluted tablets, also harmonised with Chippendale's handsome parlour chairs, whose Grecian ribbon-fretted and laurel-wreathed splats evoked Apollo's poetic triumph on Mt. Parnassus.
In the 1740s Chippendale had moved from his family home in Yorkshire to establish premises in London, and it was while trading in St. Martin's Lane at 'The Sign of the Chair' that he issued the three editions of his celebrated The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754-1762. It is likely to have been a stock of Director 'Pattern' chairs, that he disposed of in 1766, at the time that his son Thomas Chippendale Junior (d. 1822) began an increasingly important role as designer for the firm. The latter's inventions in the 'antique' fashion that had been popularised by George III's 'architect' Robert Adam (d. 1792) were featured in his pattern-book entitled Sketches of Ornament, 1779. The parlour chair pattern chosen by Lascelles could be called the 'Lansdowne' pattern as it was invented in the late 1760s for the mansion built by Adam for the Earl of Shelburne, later 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, in Berkeley Square. The Lansdowne chairs were invoiced in January 1769 for three and a half guineas each, and described as having 'Antique backs & term feet very richly Carvd...' (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. I, p. 253). The Goldsborough commission is likely to have taken place around 1771, when Daniel Lascelles was visited by the Chippendales' site foreman William Reid, while working for Daniel's brother Edwin Lascelles at neighbouring Harewood House.
The Goldsborough sideboard-table was recorded in the 1801 inventory, together with fifteen red morocco leather chairs, and described as '1 Mahogany Sideboard Table' (The Goldsborough chairs were sold anonymously, in these Rooms, 4 July 1996, lot 340 (£859,500) and are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The sideboard-table was accompanied by an oval wine-cistern on a stand. In 1784, the sideboard- table passed by inheritance to Edwin Lascelles and remained in situ until the house was vacated on the succession of the 6th Earl of Harewood in 1929 (C. Gilbert, 'The Goldsborough Chairs', Christie's International Magazine, 1996, p. 38). The late Christopher Gilbert identified another Gothic-fretted sideboard table, now at Harewood, as the one from the dining-room at Goldsborough, however given the scarcity of documention relating to the Goldsborough commission, the present table could easily be the sideboard table from the dining-room (Gilbert, op. cit., vol. I, p. 259 & vol. II, p. 191, fig. 349). The present table was acquired by the present owner's father who worked for Sidney Kitson, a prominent Leeds firm of architects. The present owner's father was given the task of redesigning The Princess Royal's Boudoir at Goldsborough in the 1920s, the date that he acquired the table.