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A REGENCY MAHOGANY AND BRONZED CENTRE TABLE BY MARSH & TATHAM, CIRCA 1810 With a sectioned green breccia marble top, each frieze centred with palmettes flanking a flower head roundel, each long side with an anthemion scroll apron below, on lion-monopodia, issuing fluted arches and scroll aprons to the short sides, on plinth base with reeded edge and brass anti-friction castors, pencil inscription '1836' to a cross brace, batten-carrying holes, originally with a wooden top, the existing marble top probably added following Charles Barry's refurbishment in the 1840s and possibly supplied by George Trollope & Sons 36 ? in. (92 cm.) high; 72 in. (183 cm.) wide; 42 in. (107 cm.) deep
This 'Roman' mahogany and bronzed centre table by Marsh & Tatham, the celebrated ‘Royal’ cabinet-making firm, is part of an extensive Regency refurbishment undertaken by Edward ‘Beau’ Lascelles (1764-1814) at Harewood House, Yorkshire in the first decade of the 19th century. It was probably supplied for the Egyptian Hall at Harewood, and was possibly accompanied by a pair of closely related tables originally from Harewood, subsequently moved to Chesterfield House, London and now in the Banqueting Room at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (1), and a pair of cross-frame stools that have remained at Harewood, both of which have virtually identical lion-head masks, and were also probably supplied by Marsh & Tatham.
CHARLES HEATHCOTE TATHAM (1772-1843)
The influence of Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772-1842) and his series of sketches of fragments of marble ‘found in excavations among the ruins of Rome’, compiled in 1799 in 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, is strikingly evident in the design of this centre table (2). C.H. Tatham, the younger brother of Thomas Tatham, who was a partner in the cabinet-making firm Marsh & Tatham of 13 Mount Street, intended these drawings to be used by designers, particularly the Prince of Wales’s architect at Carlton House, London (and later the Royal Pavilion), Henry Holland (1745-1806), who employed C.H. Tatham from 1788, and had financed his tour to Italy in the 1790s. In the Preface to Etchings, C.H. Tatham stated: ‘I am desirous to furnish the Artist with approved Models on which he may exercise his Genius…’. C.H. Tatham’s sketches inspired the connoisseur Thomas Hope (1769-1831), a member of the Society of Dilettanti, because a comparable pair of side tables could be found in the Aurora Room in Hope’s mansion/museum in Duchess Street, illustrated in its guide, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807); one of the Hope tables is now at the Huntingdon Library, Cambridge (3). A year later, another of the Regency's most important furniture designers George Smith (1786-1826) also included similar lion-monopodia on a ‘Library Table’ in his Collection of Designs for Household Furniture (1808), plate 87.
The distinctive and idiosyncratic carving of the lion’s head masks on this centre table is virtually identical to that found on a pair of side tables in the Banqueting Room at the Royal Pavilion (4). Similarly, to the table offered here, the Royal Pavilion tables were originally in the collection at Harewood House, Yorkshire (5), thus raising the tantalising possibility that the table offered here and the Pavilion tables were en suite. The motif on the frieze depicting lions drinking from a trough on the Royal Pavilion tables derives from plate 14, no. 3, of Hope’s Household Furniture. The same ornamentation occurs on a pair of bookcases supplied by the contemporaneous furniture-maker George Bullock (1777-1818) for Napoleon’s use at Longwood House, St. Helena, in circa 1815 (6). Interestingly, this table and the Royal Pavilion tables relate to one illustrated by W.H. Pyne in 1819 in ‘Th