A PAIR OF GEORGE II GILTWOOD CONSOLE TABLES

The pier-table frames are supported by Arcadian nymph heads issuing from flower-festooned, hermed and voluted trusses. French 'picturesque' patterns for such plinth-supported consoles featured in Bernard Toro'’s, Livre de Tables de Diverses Formes, Paris, 1716; and in Nicolas Pineau'’s designs issued by J. J. Mariette in Nouveaux Desseins de Pieds de Tables et de Vases et Consoles de sculpture en bois, Paris, 1734. One of Pineau'’s designs, embellished with the head and 'draco' serpent of the harvest deity Ceres, was plagiarised for a sideboard-table pattern entitled a 'Marble Table' that was issued in Batty Langley's, The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, London, 1740, pl. CXLIII.

The hermed and lambrequined figures in Pineau's design also inspired a 'slab table' pattern issued in William Jones' The Gentlemen's or Builder's Companion containing a variety of useful designs, London, 1939 (pl. 32). The fretted cartouches of these tables as well as their lambrequined figures derive from the same Pineau pattern; while their acanthus-wrapped friezes and large foliage issuing from voluted trusses relate to another of Jones's patterns (pl. 29).

Related garlanded and nymph-headed trusses feature on a mahogany sideboard-table bequeathed to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1962 (No. W49-1962).