A REGENCY ORMOLU-MOUNTED, BRASS-INLAID, PARCEL-GILT AND CALAMANDER-CROSSBANDED BRAZILIAN ROSEWOOD SOFA TABLE

This elegant table typifies the revived taste for Boulle furniture among English cognoscenti of the 1820s as popularised by such influential collectors as the Prince Regent, later George IV, and William Beckford. The demand for Boulle furniture (or 'Buhl', as it was known) was catered to by a range of antiquarian dealers in London who not only dealt in old furniture but would also adapt 18th-century Boulle pieces, or even make examples in the Boulle style. Such dealers and cabinet-makers included Louis Constantin le Gaigneur, who termed himself a 'French Buhl Manufacturer' and worked almost exclusively for the Prince Regent, later George IV, and his circle (a pair of Louis XIV-style 'Boulle' bureaux plats were delivered to the Royal Pavilion, Brighton in 1815, RCIN 35289), Thomas Parker of Air St., Piccadilly, who in 1813 supplied a pair of Boulle marquetry coffers-on-stands to the Prince Regent, which remain in the Royal Collection (RCIN 21624), and later the firm of Town and Emmanuel who traded between 1830-49 from 103 Bond St, 'Manufacturers of Buhl Marqueterie'