A SCOTTISH REGENCY ROSEWOOD WRITING TABLE

The black-figured rosewood sofa-table has Grecian-scrolled trestles formed as spindle-strung lyres that evoke the Parnassus poetry deity Apollo and derive from a pattern in Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807 (pl. 1, fig. 2). While a table of similar pattern features in the 1818 sketch-book of Messrs Gillow of London and Lancaster, it is possible that this table could equally well have been executed by the Edinburgh cabinet-maker William Trotter (d. 1834) (the Gillow sketch is illustrated in G. Wills, Craftsmen and Cabinet-Makers of Classic English Furniture, Edinburgh, 1974, fig. 109).