A GEORGE III HAREWOOD AND MARQUETRY CARD-TABLE

The drawing-room window-pier card-table is embellished in the elegant Roman manner of the 1770s, with taper hermed legs and an inlay of golden trophies celebrating lyric poetry. A sunflower, evoking the love of the poetry deity Apollo, is displayed in a scalloped and ribbon-wreathed medallion within the bow-fronted top's finely striated rosewood. Another, framed by tablets of trompe l'oeil of 'antique' flutes at the canted angles, flowers the frieze and is displayed within an 'Etruscan' pearl-wreathed patera that serves to recall Venus's triumph.

Thomas Chippendale Junior (d. 1822) is likely to have been the designer of related decoration on the sideboard pedestals supplied in the early 1770s for Harewood House, Yorkshire. A similar medallion and paterae feature on a herm-legged dressing-table of black rosewood supplied in 1772 by the St. Martin's Lane firm for Burton Constable, Yorkshire (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, figs. 352, and 427-430).