A GEORGE III GILTWOOD SIDE-TABLE WITH MICROMOSAIC TOP

The giltwood side-table follows designs for side and serving-tables with square tapering fluted legs by the fashionable London architect Robert Adam (d.1792), published in his Works in Architecture (1778), principally plate XXV, a pier table with similar leaf-carved capitals, and also plates VIII, XX, XXI. It relates closely to a side table after a design by Adam dated 1765, supplied to Sir Lawrence Dundas, 1st Baronet (d. 1781), at 19 Arlington Street, London, and which is described by the furniture historians Ralph Edwards and Margaret Jourdain as ‘probably’ by Samuel Norman (now in the Huntington Museum, Pasadena) (R. Edwards, M. Jourdain, Georgian Cabinet-Makers circa 1700-1800, London, 1955, p. 165, fig. 85). Norman’s 'considerable skill as a craftsman’ attracted the attention of Adam who undoubtedly introduced him to Dundas because from 1763-66 Norman was working at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, Aske Hall, North Yorkshire, and also at Arlington Street (S. Norman, 'A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Craftsman’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. III, no. 797, 1969, p. 504). Another pair of giltwood side tables with similarly carved supports, designed by Adam in 1765 was supplied for the Dining Room, Syon House, Middlesex, seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, (E. Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 70, fig. 104). There is however no record of Norman working for the Northumberland family, and the side tables at Syon are possibly by William France (d. 1773); France and his partner, John Bradburn (d. 1781), also worked for Dundas, notably supplying the ram’s head suite dated 1764 for Moor Park, which is now at Kenwood House, London.