A pair of George III polychrome-painted and scagliola-topped pier tables last quarter 18th century

decoration refreshed

By repute acquired by Charles Grey, 1st Earl Grey (1729-1807) for Howick Hall, Northumberland;
By repute, Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764-1845), 13 Carlton House Terrace

This unusual pair of pier tables is each playfully decorated with a twisting leafy vine that winds its way across each apron and down the table’s legs. The natural imagery combined with their simple forms and light scagliola tops indicate that these were potentially conceived as part of the interior of a garden pavilion or conservatory. While some garden furniture was conceived in stone, marble, or slate to withstand the elements, a surprising number of pieces were also made out of native woods, such as beech and lime and decorated with oil-based paints (see Elizabeth White, “Painted Perches: The Evidence for English Painted Wooden Furniture in Eighteenth-Century Gardens” in Painted Wood: History and Conservation, vol. ii, Los Angeles, 1998, pp. 128-142). Painted seats, most notably painted Windsor chairs which were highly fashionable in eighteenth century gardens, were used as resting places in gardens as well as in the interiors of the small pleasure pavilions built to provide momentary reprieves during a walk through a picturesque English garden.

White and green were the most popular colors for garden furniture beginning in the 1760s. Robert Manwaring wrote in his design book Cabinet and Chair-Maker’s Real Friend and Companion (1765) about two garden seats, Plates 29 and 30, that “the ornamental parts should be painted green, and shaded as expressed in the Plate, which will appear extremely beautiful”. The present pair of tables, with their white and green decoration, relates to this interest in the picturesque and integrating the interior of the garden pavilions with their surroundings to create a holistic, natural effect. In the eighteenth century, many treatises were written on how to lay out the ideal garden. Sir William Chambers, heavily influenced by Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), promoted the idea that the most beautiful gardens are unified in form and color. A table painted to match the surrounding gardens, therefore, would have been aesthetically and philosophically appealing to an eighteenth century eye.

This pair of tables reputedly once had a label inscribed 'Earl Grey, 13 Carlton House Terrace'. While it seems to have been with Charles Grey, 2^nd Earl Grey at 13 Carlton House Terrace, he only lived there beginning in 1851. The reverse of the now lost label apparently read '__console lately from Hall/ AL 154', indicating that the tables were possibly previously with Charles Grey, 1^st Earl Grey at Howick Hall, Northumberland.