AN EARLY VICTORIAN BURR-ASH, BURR-YEW AND MARQUETRY CENTRE TABLE

The Victorian pattern for such a 'Marqueterie Centre Table', with hollow-sided and Vitruvian wave-scrolled 'altar' or 'candelabrum' pedestal, appears to have been invented in the early 1830s by the architect Richard Hicks Bridgens and featured in his Furniture with candelabra and Interior Decoration, 1st ed. 1825 & 1838, which advertised his recent return from service as Superintendent of Public Works in the West Indies. Its 'Louis Quatorze' marquetry on an ebony ground is executed in the Dutch fashion adopted in the 1820s by the Tottenham Court Road 'Cabinet inlayer and Buhl manufacturer' Robert Blake.
The firm, which had been trading in the early 1840s as Blake, Geo. & Brothers, inlayers, etc' in Tottenham Court Road and Mount Street, Mayfair were renamed George Blake & Co. in the late 1840s (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture, Leeds, 1996, p.18; and M. P. Levy, Furniture History Society Newsletter, no. 158, May 2005). A table of similar form, attributed to George Blake & Co and probably commissioned through Queen Victoria's Board of Works in the late 1840's for Claremont, Surrey, then home to Louis-Philippe, the recently abdicated King of France, was sold anonymously, Christie's, London, 23 November 2006, lot 123 (£33,600).