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Lot Essay
The china-table's inlaid top presents a silken-ribboned and cut-cornered tablet that is Roman-mosaiced in 'double braced paling' as popularised by W. Halfpenny's, Twenty New Designs of Chinese Lattice (1750). It reflects the French manner promoted in the 1760s by Paris-trained ébénistes such as Christopher Fuhrlohg (d. after 1787), of Tottenham Court Road, whose trade-sheet advertised 'Modern' fashions in 'Grecian and Chinese Taste' (G. Beard, Dictionary of English Furniture Makers: 1660-1840, Leeds, 1986). While its ribboned altar-tripod pillar and wave-scrolled 'claw', likewise reed-banded, is flowered in a Gothic fret of ring-tied quatrefoils and relates to a flowered pole-screen pattern in Messrs Ince & Mayhew's, Universal System of Household Furniture, 1762, pl. 50. Such tables well suited fashionable dressing-rooms serving as 'salles de reception', and were conceived as altars for the tea-service or 'Chinese collation'.
A mahogany tripod table with a base of similar feeling but with pierced central column and undertier, was supplied in 1755 to 2nd Duke of Atholl, for Atholl House (now Blair Castle), by William Masters of The Golden Fleece, Coventry Street, Piccadilly (A. Coleridge, 'William Masters and some early 18th century furniture at Blair Castle, Scotland', Connoisseur, October 1963, p. 80, fig. 6). Another, similar table, also attributed to William Masters, was offered anonymously, Christie's, New York, 7 April 2006, lot 292.
A mahogany tripod table with a base of similar feeling but with pierced central column and undertier, was supplied in 1755 to 2nd Duke of Atholl, for Atholl House (now Blair Castle), by William Masters of The Golden Fleece, Coventry Street, Piccadilly (A. Coleridge, 'William Masters and some early 18th century furniture at Blair Castle, Scotland', Connoisseur, October 1963, p. 80, fig. 6). Another, similar table, also attributed to William Masters, was offered anonymously, Christie's, New York, 7 April 2006, lot 292.