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Around 1800, the 'gloomth' of formal English parlours and drawing rooms was dispersed as they became living rooms for entertainment and assembly. The more relaxed mode of furnishing also coincided with improved methods in lighting and heating. Much of the furniture moved away from the walls to take up permanent residence clustered around the fireplaces and in the room centres. Those chairs that remained regimented against the walls, became interspersed with low bookcases, and proved ideal resting places for colourful vases, china and bronzes. Some took a while to adjust to the new fashion, which caused some to consider that the grand apartments of a house had taken on the appearance of a cabinet-maker or upholsterer's warehouse. The Third Earl of Mansfield's carefully orchestrated refurbishment of the Long Gallery at Scone Palace transformed the cloister-like gallery into a comfortable music saloon. It also served as a temple dedicated to the muses of artistic inspiration, with its fine art collection of paintings and sculpture lit by colza lamps and French candelabra. Beneath a gothic arched and flowered ceiling, its floor was parquetried in Louis Quatorze fashion with a Roman lozenged mosaic, in keeping with the rooms Italian paintings and marble figures and tazzae. Ottoman sofas occupying the room-centre, were accompanied by fireside French-fashioned bergere chairs, whose design, like that of the sofa-tables, harmonised with the rooms romantic Greian gothic architecture invented by William Atkinson. Interspersed with the oak seats were French chairs, whose golden frames were serpentined in the Louis XV 'picturesque' fashion and recalled the family's close links to the French Eighteenth Century Court.

A REGENCY OAK AND PINE CENTRE TABLE

CIRCA 1815, THE DESIGN ATTRIBUTED TO WILLIAM ATKINSON, PROBABLY BY GEORGE BULLOCK

Details

A REGENCY OAK AND PINE CENTRE TABLE
CIRCA 1815, THE DESIGN ATTRIBUTED TO WILLIAM ATKINSON, PROBABLY BY GEORGE BULLOCK
The apparently original pine top previously covered with red felt on gothic panelled end-standards joined by an undertier, on recessed castors, the underside with a printed paper label 'Mura, England', one corner foot moulding missing
28¾ in. (73 cm.) high; 66 in. (167½ cm.) long; 39 in. (99 cm.) deep

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

This library sofa-table is designed in Atkinson's British or 'Elizabethan' style, with its Grecian-scrolled and plinth-supported pilasters fretted in the gothic manner (see Thomas King's, The Modern Style of Cabinet Work Exemplified, 1829). Atkinson contributed designs to the London and Liverpool cabinet-maker George Bullock (d.1818), whose 'British Oak' furnishings in his 'tasteful repository' in London's Tenterden Street was lauded in Rudolph Ackermann's, Repository of Arts, 1816. Some of this furniture, such as furnished Napoleon's residence on St. Helena and displaying beautifully polished and variegated oak tablets framed in Grecian black ribbon inlay, was to feature in Christie's 1819 sale of stock on Bullock's premises (3 May 1819). The present single arch trestle pattern was also adopted for Bullock's contemporary ebony-inlaid sofa-table supplied for Battle Abbey, Sussex, and is likely to have been veneered from ancient Scott of Buccleuch stag-headed oak, acquired by Bullock in 1812. (C. Wainwright et al, George Bullock, London, 1988, no.14). Buccleuch oak is also likely to have been introduced on another of Bullock's tables, (which remains at Scone Palace) acquired by the Earl of Mansfield and discussed by Anthony Coleridge in The Work of George Bullock cabinet-maker, in Scotland : 2, Connoisseur, May 1965, p.4, fig. 11. This table can be seen illustrated in the centre of J.Gibb's painting of the Long Gallery circa 1827 (see opposite). A further table of similar design also with a veneered top can be seen hiiden behind the first table.

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