A George II carved giltwood console table, in the manner of William Kent, circa 1750

H.R.H. Prince George, Duke of Kent;

H.R.H. Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, until sold Christie's, London, Derby House, 13th March 1947, lot 234;

Sotheby's London, Important English Furniture, 13th June 2001, lot 104.

William Kent’s style is instantly recognisable yet always varied: though there are typical ‘Kentian’ decorative motifs that can be esasily identified, like fish-scale textures, pronounced scrolls and bounteous festoons, he also brought these together with an originality that kept the style from becoming repetitive. Active from around the 1720s until his death in 1748, Kent brought a sense of architectural presence and bold grandeur to furniture and interiors that profoundly shaped the taste of designers, makers and decorators across Britain.

These tables demonstrate a Kentian principle in their design, namely the transposition or translation of architectural features into furniture: the faceted structure visually recalls classical pilasters, while the unusual grouping of the front legs mimics the cluster columns found in Romanesque and Gothic church architecture. While these tables are Kentian in overall style, these distinctive clustered column legs with foliate volutes may link them to Matthias Lock, who drew a table of similar structure and design, now in the V&A (2848:98). In addition, numerous other tables either by Kent or in the Kentian style show analogous legs:

• The most similar tables are a pair in Woburn Abbey – not only do these tables include similar festoons connecting at a central cartouche, but these are also one of the few examples with the larger volute at the top of the leg, as on the present lot, and not the bottom. Though these were in the Canaletto Room when Woburn first reopened in 1955,¹ the later 1987 guidebook shows them in the State Dining Room and states that they were “made in 1757 by John West at a cost of £53.10s.”²
• A pair of tables in Hampton Court Palace, illustrated in the Duke of Cumberland’s Presence Chamber in Weber’s monograph on Kent¹ but now in the Public Dining Room (RCIN 26805), also feature triple-clustered legs with volutes
• John Soane’s Museum hold a similar pair of tables (H22 and H23) that were explored in depth in an article in Furniture History⁴ but without a conclusive attribution to Kent
• A somewhat comparable table in the MET (26.45) is attributed to Matthias Lock due to its similarity with the Lock drawing in the V&A
• Numerous similar examples have appeared at auction, including at Christie’s London, 9^th December 2010, lot 35; Sotheby’s New York, Craig Wright Interiors, 4^th October 2006, lot 174; Sotheby’s London, 4^th July 1997, lot 36 and Sotheby’s London, 10^th July 1998, lot 11.

This table was in the collection of the Duke of Kent, Prince George, who was the younger brother of the kings Edward VIII and George VI. He and Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent had residences at 3 Belgrave Square and at Coppins in Buckinghamshire. He had an eye for decorating and his wife said to the Dowager Lady Airlie that she “let him make all the decisions over furniture and decorations. He has a wonderful sense of colour and design”.⁵ After Prince George tragically died as part of the crew on an RAF aeroplane in 1942, Princess Marina sold their collection of furniture in two tranches, in November 1942 and May 1947; these tables sold in the second of the two sales as lot 234.

¹ See the photographs of ‘The Canaletto Room’ in the illustrated guidebooks Woburn Abbey published in 1969 and 1977 [no pagination]

² See ‘The State Dining Room’ in the 1987 illustrated guidebook [no pagination]

³ Roger White, ‘Kent and the Gothic Revival’, in William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, ed. Susan Weber, New Haven, 2013, p.251 fig.10.7.

⁴ Peter Thornton ‘Soane’s Kent tables’, in Furniture History, 1993, pp.59-65.

⁵ Quoted in Christopher Warwick, George and Marina, Duke and Duchess of Kent, 1988, p.143.