A George II Polychrome, Ebonized and Parcel-Gilt Side Table, Circa 1755

This table forms part of a suite of three of identical size and model, the other two forming a pair with matched 18th-century Italian veined white marble tops that formerly stood in the banqueting hall at Stanmer Park near Brighton, built in the 1720s by the French architect Nicolas Dubois for the landowner and politician Henry Pelham (d.1725). The house was inherited in 1737 by his nephew Thomas Pelham, also a prominent Whig politician, and the tables were likely commissioned at the time of his marriage to Anna Meinhardt Frankland in 1754. The blind gothic-style fretwork is an archetypal ornamental motif of the 1750s and appears in a design for a sideboard table in plate XXXIX of Thomas Chippendale's Director, published the same year.

The pair of tables was sold along with much of the contents of Stanmer Park at Sotheby's London, 30 June 1950, lot 152, and then passed into the collection of Humphrey Whitbread, sold Christie's London 5 April 2001, lot 330. The Hyde Park table however was not part of the Stanmer Park sale and is first recorded with the Wiltshire antiques dealer Rupert Gentle, who sold it to Vernay & Jussel in New York. It is possible the table may have been retained by the 9th Earl of Chichester (b.1944), who in 1966 acquired Little Durnford Manor in Wiltshire, and may have then sold to the piece to Gentle. The table was subsequently acquired by Mr and Mrs Charles Engelhard Jr. for their Georgian Revival estate Cragwood in northern New Jersey, with interiors created by the firm Parish Hadley. Charles Engelhard (d.1971) was a industrialist and thoroughbred horse racer whose wife Jane, née Mary Jane Reiss (1917-2004) and widow of the German banker Fritz Mannheimer, was a notable socialite and philanthropist who served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum and Morgan Library in New York.

A paint analysis reveals the table was originally decorated with a Prussian blue oil paint over a very thin grey undercoat, of which original traces remain. It was then painted twice in off-white, and sometime in the mid-20th century the white was stripped and the table repainted in blue, and then in the present black scheme undertaken by Parish Hadley for Mrs Engelhard. The pair formerly in the Whitbread Collection had been overpainted in grey and cream by the time it was sold in 2001.