A GEORGE III POLYCHROME-DECORATED CENTRE TABLE

The elegant white japanned table is embellished in Robert Adam's Roman Etruscan fashion in celebration of lyric poetry and appropriate for a bedroom apartment. 'Apollo' sunflowered patera wreath its frieze, which is festooned in beribboned laurels like the herm-tapered legs; while more laurels enwreath its Etruscan-red top, which displays a figurative medallion of 'Venus nurturing Cupid' in the fashion popularised by Angelica Kauffman (d.1810). In the late 1770s Kauffman provided such 'little pictures' to be executed in Matthew Boulton's 'copper' painting technique (see N. Goodison, Matthew Boulton: Ormolu, London, 2002, p.269). The table bears the label adopted in 1787 by the St. Paul's Churchyard cabinet-maker George Simson (d.1840).