A Regency Egyptian Revival Gilt and Ebonised Wood and Bronze-Painted and Parcel Gilt Plaster Pier Table and Mirror, probably by Peter Francis Chenu, Dated 1805

This pier table and mirror along with the pair of console tables en suite (lot 91) epitomise Regency England's fascination with Ancient Egypt, a taste already manifest in the late 18th century as part of the broader movement of European neoclassicism and seen in pioneering interiors like the Egyptian Room at Cairness House, Aberdeenshire designed by James Playfair in 1793. The primary impetus derived from Napoleon's Egyptian campaign that resulted in the publication of Baron Vivant-Denon's Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte and concluded with Napoleon's spectacular defeat by Admiral Nelson at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, which spread the trend for Egyptomanie across the Channel. Prominent architects, designers and connoisseurs propelled the Egyptian Revival in England, among them Thomas Hope, whose Egyptian Room at his celebrated house in Duchess Street was published in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807), and William Bullock, brother of the cabinetmaker George Bullock, who constructed the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1812 (demolished 1905) to house a museum of natural history, ethnography and Napoleonic relics. His trade card incorporated a sphinx of very similar form to that of the present table (illustrated in Clive Wainwright, George Bullock -Cabinet Maker, London 1988, p. 42, fig. 13).

Pierre-François Chenu (1760-1834) was born in Paris, son of the sculptor Nicolas-François Chenu, professor at the Académie de Saint-Luc, and Marie-Françoise Marchandon, daughter of the sculptor Firmin Marchandon. In 1778 he enrolled in the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture where he remained until 1782, and from 1784 was recorded under the anglicised name of Peter Francis Chenu at the school of the Royal Academy in London, where he was awarded a silver medal in 1785 and gold medal in 1786. He exhibited at the Academy from 1788 until 1822. His entire career appears to have been spent in London; he is documented renting studios at nos. 3 and 122 Wardour Street in Soho during the 1790s and at Charles Street in Mayfair from 1802-22, and he trained several British and Irish sculptors including Peter Turnerelli, William Behnes and Patrick MacDowell.