A GEORGE IV BRASS-MOUNTED MAHOGANY SERVING-TABLE

Each of these serving-tables were possibly commissioned for Swallowfield Park, Berkshire by Sir Henry Russell, 2nd Baronet (d. 1852), and former 'Resident of Hyderabad', and are likely to have been designed in the early 1820s by the architect William Atkinson (d. 1839) following his aggrandisement of the house with a 'very handsome Grecian front'. At this period Atkinson was also assisting the connoisseur Thomas Hope at The Deepdene, Surrey.
The serving-table (lot 557) reflects the contemporary robust Grecian style with its French-fashioned ormolu gallery fretted with a palm-flowered ribbon-guilloche that derives from the Erechtheon, Athens. Each of the table’s Ionic voluted and truss-scrolled pilasters terminate in bacchic lion-paws that recall the Pantheon's celebrated sarcophagus of Agrippa. The latter had inspired a design for hall furniture in George Smith's Collection of Designs for Household Furniture, 1808 (pl. 34).
The sarcophagus scroll as well as the gallery relate to antiquities illustrated in C.H. Tatham, Etchings Representing the Best Examples of Ancient Ornamental Architecture Drawn from the Originals in Rome and Other Parts of Italy during the Years 1794, 1795 and 1796, London, 1799 (pls. 80 and 14). A second edition appeared in 1803, and a third in 1810.