An Exceptionally Rare George III Mahogany and Sabicu Tripod Table - Apter-Fredericks Antique Furniture, Dealer

The canted rectangular tilt-top, inlaid with a pattern of Chinese paling supported on a concave-sided tapering triangular column which has been carved with blind fretwork. The column dividing into three inwardly scrolling moulded cabriole legs carved with similar blind fret decoration.

The china-table's inlaid top presents a silken-ribboned and cut-cornered tablet that has '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 ebenistes 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).

Its ribboned altar-tripod pillar and wave-scrolled 'foot' is decorated in a Gothic inspired fret of ring-tied quatrefoils. This decoration relates to a flowered pole-screen pattern, pl. 50 and a tea kettle stand pattern, plate 14, both in Messrs Ince & Mayhew's, Universal System of Household Furniture, 1762. 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).