A George III Giltwood and Bronzed Console Table, Circa 1775

D.L. Isaacs, London 1914

William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925), The Hill at Hampstead, London

Hyde Park Antiques, New York

Roger Rechler, New York

Sotheby's New York, 16 March 2012, lot 6

Patrick Broome, The Hyde Park Collection, 1965-1990: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album, Hong Kong 1989, pp. 182-183

Emily Eerdmans, Classic English Design and Antiques: Period Styles and Furniture, The Hyde Park Antiques Collection, New York 2006, p. 168

The form of a semi-elliptical console with legs headed by boldly sculpted ram's heads was introduced into English furniture with two console tables designed by Robert Adam and executed by William France and John Bradburn for Sir Lawrence Dundas at 19 Arlington Street, London in 1765. The design reflects the early 'Grecian' phase of neoclassicism promoted by the architects William Chambers, James 'Athenian' Stuart and Robert Adam following their Continental travels, and appeared again five years later in a table supplied by Thomas Chippendale for the State Dining Room at Harewood House, Yorkshire (both the Chippendale table and one Dundas table illustrated in Ralph Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, Vol. III., Woodbridge 1954, p. 296 figs. 63, 64).

David Lewis Isaacs (1842-1912) was one of London's most prominent antique dealers during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and became the firm of Moss Harris & Sons following Isaacs's death. The English industrialist, peer and philanthropist William Hesketh Lever was born in Lancashire and with his younger brother James founded Lever Brothers Soap Manufacturers, which later became the multinational Unilever. He was an important collector of British Art and English furniture from the Adam period in particular, believing it to be of equal if not superior artistic merit to French work of the same era that was actively acquired by his contemporaries. Much of his collection now forms the nucleus of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Merseyside.