This exotic centerpiece was conceived in the Egyptian taste which was promoted by the connoisseur Thomas Hope and adopted in 1802 by George, Prince of Wales as the style for the "Royan Grand Service." Hope, who toured Egypt in 1797, adapted ideas from Percier and Fontaine's Recueil de Decoration Interieur of 1801 and Vivant Denon's Voyage dans la Basse et le Haute Egypte, published in London in 1802, which drew on information gathered by Napoleon's Art Commission in Egypt of 1798 (see footnote to lot 235). These ideas were manifested in the spectacular apartment Hope created for his Egyptian "curiosities" in his Dutchess Street mansion/museum, acquired in 1799. The chimney piece of this apartment, modelled on the Egyptian Apollo portico, displayed the sun-disc tablet which appears on the stand of the present lot. The body is supported by addorsed and monopodia chimerae, formed from the head and claws of a protective monobreasted Egyptian sphynx, recalling the celebrated Pompeian bronze tripod in Naples. Hope's version of the tripod featured in his Egyptian apartment in his Dutchess Street guide, Household furniture and Decoration of 1807. The guide acknowledged a debt to Norden's Travels in Egypt and Nubia of 1757 and the bowl's husk-festooned Apollo masks which are displayed against a papyrus-enriched corona recall Norden's illustration of the Great Sphynx.

An album of drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, attributed to the French artist, Jean-Jacques Boileau, includes one for a wine cooler with grecian fret ribbon and masked escutcheon decoration, while another is supported on similar sphynx monopodiae. Boileau assisted the architect Henry Holland with the decoration of Carlton House for the Prince of Wales and is assumed to have worked for Rundell and Bridge at the beginning of the nineteenth century.