A pair of late Victorian marble and giltwood console tables in the manner of William Kent and Benjamin Goodison

A pair of late Victorian marble and giltwood console tables in the manner of William Kent and Benjamin Goodison, each with the original rectangular spinach green marble top with shaped cut corners, set above an ornately carved base with an arabesque and patera frieze and pendant openwork garlands, all supported by six acanthus scroll legs with pendant bell flowers within fielded panels.  English, circa 1880.

These tables relate to a series of surviving examples designed by William Kent around 1730 for houses such as Devonshire House in London, Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Rousham in Oxfordshire.  Kent frequently reused his designs for furniture with little in the way of major alterations and all three of these commissions used tables which are closely related to the current pair.  All have the more usual four legs rather than the six used on this pair.

For similar examples see the Castle Howard tables in Country Life, 11^th of June 1927, p.954 fig. 14 in the Garden Hall.  One of the Rousham set is illustrated in Margaret Jourdain’s The Work of William Kent, London, 1948, fig. 146 while the Devonshire House tables were recently on the London art market and were illustrated in Ronald Phillips Ltd.’s 2015 catalogue.