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Lot Essay
This sideboard-table is designed in the 'Modern' Roman manner illustrated in the final edition of Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Directors, 1754-62. Its mahogany top, which replaces the marble slab of the early 18th century Roman style sideboard, is supported on a richly carved frame with paired pilasters allowing for a central wine-cistern recess. It is fitted, in Elizabethan fashion, with sliding tablettes for water-fountains concealed in the sides of its Pan reeded cornice, which is clasped in a gothic flowered and cusped ribbon-guilloche. Its façade, wreathed in festive bas-relief trophies of beribboned reeds, conceals drawers that are banded by a reed moulding enriched with a water-bubbled ribbon-guilloche. Roman acanthus flowers the Ionic waved volutes of its Jonesian truss-scrolled and leaf-wrapped tablets, from which husks festoon the sunk-fluted and herm-tapered pilasters. Similar paired and husk-festooned pilasters and the Arcadian reed-trophies featured in Chippendale's sideboard patterns of 1760, while the foliated truss featured on his 1762 pattern for a French commode-table (Chippendale, ibid., 3rd ed. 1762, pls. 114, 176 and 68).
This form of truss scroll supported voluted leg was adopted for Roman patterned sideboard-tables with marble tops, such as that recorded in the inventory of Newby Hall, Yorkshire by Thomas Chippendale the Younger in 1792, described as 'A Carv'd Mahogany Sideboard Table with Marble Slabs Egyptian £10'. This has associated with Chippendale's own workshop in the recent Guide Book of Newby - and certainly the scroll volute trusses recall those on a pair of tables supplied by Chippendale for James West at Alscot Park, Warwickshire in 1767 (illustrated in C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, vol.II, London, 1978, fig.472). A set of three closely related sideboard tables - undoubtedly executed in the same workshop as those at Newby - were supplied to Brownlow, 9th Earl of Exeter for the South Dining Room at Burghley House. Recorded in the Inventory begun in 1764, one has a figured alabastro fiorito veneered top brought back from the Grand Tour by the 9th Earl around 1763; the smaller pair, like the Sainsbury table, have mahogany 'slabs' with a sliding mahogany shelf within the frieze cornice to each end.
This form of truss scroll supported voluted leg was adopted for Roman patterned sideboard-tables with marble tops, such as that recorded in the inventory of Newby Hall, Yorkshire by Thomas Chippendale the Younger in 1792, described as 'A Carv'd Mahogany Sideboard Table with Marble Slabs Egyptian £10'. This has associated with Chippendale's own workshop in the recent Guide Book of Newby - and certainly the scroll volute trusses recall those on a pair of tables supplied by Chippendale for James West at Alscot Park, Warwickshire in 1767 (illustrated in C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, vol.II, London, 1978, fig.472). A set of three closely related sideboard tables - undoubtedly executed in the same workshop as those at Newby - were supplied to Brownlow, 9th Earl of Exeter for the South Dining Room at Burghley House. Recorded in the Inventory begun in 1764, one has a figured alabastro fiorito veneered top brought back from the Grand Tour by the 9th Earl around 1763; the smaller pair, like the Sainsbury table, have mahogany 'slabs' with a sliding mahogany shelf within the frieze cornice to each end.