Pair 19th century Gothic design tables

POA

These fabulous pier-tables of rectangular and cut-cornered form, were conceived by the architect John Soane (d.1837), Deputy Surveyor of George 3rd’s Woods and Forests, in a French ‘medieval’ fashion. Their ebony and mosaiced tops are richly polychromed with varie-coloured glass panels, and their ebonised frames are similarly flowered with golden framed quatrefoils between dentilled cornices and pointed ‘Gothic’ arches. The ‘massy’ octagonal pillared legs are enriched with tablets, framed in gilt-bronze (ormolu), and support foliage-wrapped capitals. Their bulbous bases are likewise wrapped in acanthus alternating in triumphal palms. Their form relates to the ebonised pier-tables, with ivory enrichments, designed by Soane for the Medieval Library he created for Stowe in 1805.

One of these tables is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Ebony furniture was imagined by Horace Walpole (d.1792) to date from the reign of Elizabeth 1, others imagined it to date from the Etruscans, since Wedgwood potteries were making copies of Etruscan vases, since William Hamilton’s, Etruscan Vases, 1769.

This information above has been gratefully received by Mr John Hardy, a founder member of the Furniture History Society. Hardy was a Furniture consultant at Christie’s London, before joining Christie’s, he spent almost thirty years as a curator in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Department of Furniture.

English circa 1830 -40.