A GEORGE III GILTWOOD AND SCAGLIOLA PIER TABLE

The pier-table is of demi-medallion form in the George III 'Roman' fashion of the 1770s, and its white marble top is scagliola-inlaid in Roman-mosaic manner including an Etruscan red and black ribbon. Its central sunflowered compartment, evoking the sun-god 'Apollo'as Mt. Parnassus' poetry deity, is wreathed by a beribboned garland of Jupiter's sacred oak that would be appropriate for a sideboard-table recalling the banquet of the gods. The golden table-frieze is wreathed, en suite with the antique-fluted columnar legs, by triumphal palms and a 'Venus' pearled ribbon-guilloche.
Its 'Etruscan' vase colouring was popularised by Robert Adam's, Works in Architecture, 1774; while amongst the most celebrated manufacturers of such scagliola were the London firm of Bartoli and Richter, who had taken out a 1770 patent for 'an Art or Method of inlaying Scagliola or Plaister in and upon Marble'.
Amongst their employees was Peter Bossi (fl. 1785-1798), who later became a famed Dublin stucco-worker and 'inlayer' in marble (see C. O'Neill, 'In Search of Bossi', Journal of the Irish Georgian Society, vol. I, 1998, pp. 146-175,fig. 12). Bossi who supplied related table tops for Carton, Ireland around 1780, also advertised two such table tops in 1786 as 'an elegant pair of statuary marble tables the whole inlaid scajola, on an entire new design' (information kindly supplied by John Rogers). Such 'sideboard table tops' were also manufactured by John Baptiste Cuvillie (d.1788) and Joseph Butcher, who boasted his 'Artificial Marble...Side-Boards...equal in colour and polish to any kind of Marble' ibid. Related border patterns featured in patterns illustrated by Adam's protégé Michaelangelo Pergolesi (d.1838) in his, Designs for Various Ornaments, 1771-1801. Related tops also feature on tables at Dunsany Castle, Ireland (D. Guinness and W. Ryan, Irish Houses and Castles, 1972, p.256).