拍品专文
The sideboard-table is designed in the robust late eighteenth century 'antique' fashion, and its projecting paired pillars are intended to provide a triumphal 'arch' for the display of a wine cistern and ewers. The connoisseur Thomas Hope introduced a similar table at his Duchess Street mansion/museum around 1800 (see T.Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pl.9).
The table's antique-bronze black japanned frame has its frieze enwreathed in festive sacrificial manner evoking the harvest deity Ceres with golden libation-patera plates enwreathed by Pan's reeds; while its herm-tapered pilasters are similarly reed-wreathed in the Egyptian manner. Statuary marble and ormolu-enriched pillars of this pattern supported the red Egtptian granite tablets of sideboard-tables that were commissioned in the mid 1790's for Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire' by the connoisseur William Beckford (d.1844), Admired at the time for their 'style of much elegance', Beckford's tables are thought to have been supplied under the direction of his architect James Wyatt (d.1813) by Benjamin Vulliamy (d.1811), whose son Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy served as 'Furniture Man' to George IV, when Prince of Wales (D.E.Ostergard, ed., William Beckford, London, 2001, p.64 and fig.3-15).
The table's antique-bronze black japanned frame has its frieze enwreathed in festive sacrificial manner evoking the harvest deity Ceres with golden libation-patera plates enwreathed by Pan's reeds; while its herm-tapered pilasters are similarly reed-wreathed in the Egyptian manner. Statuary marble and ormolu-enriched pillars of this pattern supported the red Egtptian granite tablets of sideboard-tables that were commissioned in the mid 1790's for Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire' by the connoisseur William Beckford (d.1844), Admired at the time for their 'style of much elegance', Beckford's tables are thought to have been supplied under the direction of his architect James Wyatt (d.1813) by Benjamin Vulliamy (d.1811), whose son Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy served as 'Furniture Man' to George IV, when Prince of Wales (D.E.Ostergard, ed., William Beckford, London, 2001, p.64 and fig.3-15).