Apter-Fredericks

A George III Parcel-Gilt and Painted Satinwood Pier Table

Height: 2'11" 90cm
Width: 5' 8" 174cm
Depth: 24" 62cm

The semi-elliptical table features a superbly decorated satinwood top above a similarly decorated frieze. The top is veneered in satinwood and painted with naturalistic flower swags bordered by a detailed guilloche pattern. The frieze is hung with flower sprays and centered by Cupid's arrows gathered in a quiver and ribbon-tied with the flaming torch of Hymenaios (the Roman god of marriage), symbolizing the union of love and marriage. The table is supported on four stop-fluted gilt-wood legs.

The quality and originality of the decoration is exceptional and the colour of the satinwood has transformed over time and has a lustrous quality rarely seen.

English, Circa 1785

Bantry House, County Cork, Ireland

This satinwood table reflects a time when the court of George III (d.1820) was seeking to combine the Roman taste popularized in England by Robert Adam with that of the French court of Louis XVI (d.1793). The flower swags featured on the top of the table closely relate to a design for a Gobelins tapestry commissioned in 1772 to decorate the so-called Tapestry Room in the State Apartment at Osterley Park, Middlesex.

From the end of the 1770s the taste for painted decoration grew with Émigré painters having considerable influence, particularly in the use of design motifs originating from continental Europe. Apart from its aesthetic introduction of colour, painted decoration does not fade and proved to be a more cost effective method of decoration than marquetry.

The present table relates to other examples of furniture featuring very similar painted decoration with swags of ribbon-tied flowers against a satinwood reserve. This includes a pair of pier tables in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Merseyside (see Percy MacQuoid, The Leverhulme Art Collections, 1928, vol. III, No. 377 pl. 94) and a semi-circular table that was part of a group of furniture supplied to Lord Howard de Walden by the firm of Chipcase & Lambert between 1768 and 1786 for Audley End, Suffolk (see Ralph Edwards and Percy MacQuoid, The Dictionary of English Furniture, 1954 rev. ad., 3 vols., vol. Ill, p. 300, fig. 75).

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