Tables
A George III mahogany silver table.
Width: 94 cm 36"
Depth: 59 cm 23"
Further images
Provenance
Ginsburg & Levy, New York, c. 1958
Rolleston Ltd., London
Ronald Phillips, London
Private Collection: New York, USA
Publications
The Connoisseur, September 1958; Ginsburg & Levy
N. I. Bienenstock, Thomas Chippendale: The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director (New York, 1966), reprint of 1762 third edition and supplement, pl. 13
Country Life, June 2009,
A GEORGE III MAHOGANY SILVER TABLE
English, circa 1760
A carved mahogany silver table in the Chinese taste. The serpentine top with a pierced fret gallery above a conforming frieze carved with egg-and-dart moulding and acanthus-leaf corner brackets. The square moulded legs are joined by a shaped and pierced pagoda-form stretcher with a turned central finial. The block feet retain their original leather castors.
The pierced fret gallery and pagoda-form stretcher place the table within the Chinese taste of the mid eighteenth century.
The survival of the original gallery, stretcher and castors is notable, these carvings are frequently replaced or lost on comparable tables.
N. I. Bienenstock illustrated the table in the 1966 Dover reprint of Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. He described it as “a very rare example of an English silver table in the finest taste” and stated that the frets on the gallery and pagoda stretcher were “the finest known”.
The design belongs to the Chippendale period and reflects the use of Chinese-inspired ornament in English furniture of the 1750s and 1760s.