.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Several such examples were supplied in 1765 and executed by various top cabinet-makers. This group includes one for Sir Lawrence Dundas, 1st Baronet (d. 1781) at 19 Arlington Street, London, 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. 164, 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 similar pair of eight-legged tables was supplied for Syon House in the same year to support the Duke of Northumberland’s Italian mosaic slabs (E. Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors, New Haven and London, 2001, pp. 75-78, figs. 111, 113-114). There is no record of Norman working for the family, and the 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. A third pair of stone-painted tables was made by the carver Sefferin Alken for Croome Court, Adam’s largest commission, and these now reside in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, respectively (E. Harris, op. cit., p. 51, fig. 74). Of note, the pendant husk panels compare to the tripod pedestals for Sir Watkin Williams Wynn’s London home at 20 St. James’s Square of 1777 (E. Harris, The Furniture of Robert Adam, London, 1963, fig. 139).This spectacular neoclassical table, with its distinctive arrangement of paired paneled legs above turned gadrooned feet, conforms to side and serving-tables designed by pre-eminent architect Robert Adam (d.1792), and published in his Works in Architecture (1778).