The executed sideboard tables in the drawing room at Syon are a modified version of this design. They have ram heads at the top of the legs rather than masks, an apron of segmental rosettes enclosed within fans, rather than anthemia and festoons, the frieze is ornamented with double calyx alternating with stigils, rather than enclosed anthemia, and there is no guilloche along the edge of the table slab. The Roman mosaic inset in the slab reputedly came from the Baths of Titus, and cost £200.

This design was repeated almost exactly for the Earl of Coventry for the gallery at Croome Court. A pair of tables were made and one of these survives at the Philadelphi Museum of Art. The design is included in volume II of The works in architecture of Robert and James Adam, and labelled as being for Lord Bute, suggesting that it had been rejected by the Duke of Northumberland.

Other furniture in this room includes a long stool datable to c1775, possibly by Adam; a fine escritoire by the cabinetmakers Ince and Mayhew (not to an Adam design), and a collection of nineteenth-century seat furniture which appears to have been designed to match the eighteenth-century long stool.

Group

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk