$15,000
Estimate: $8,000 - $12,000
English & Continental Furniture & Decorative Arts
Auction: October 7, 2014 11:00:00 AM EDT
The circular black slate top centered by a specimen marble chess board and surrounded by four micromosaic ovals depicting the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Forum and the Capitaline Hill , the edge banded with marble inlaid geometric shapes, over a parcel gilt ebonized and gilt painted base having three dogs head carved supports raised on tripartite base.
H: 28 1/2, D: 26 in.Provenance: Property from the collection of Henry C. Gibson and his descendants, sold to benefit the Henry Foundation for Botanical Research, Pennsylvania.
From the Henry C. Gibson home at 1612 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, designed by Furness and Hewitt in 1870 to house Gibson's incredible collection. The interiors were formed into a series of small rooms, called "cabinets'', that suited the aesthetic movement notion that art should be integrated into the living space, rather than separated in a gallery. "Furness and Hewitt drenched the interior of the Gibson house in sybaritic splendor, making it look rather like an extended Moorish smoking room. Each cabinet was distinguished by cusped horseshoe arches and geometric wood screens, behind which tantalizing vistas beckoned. Even the furniture was designed with an eye toward the ensemble, so that leonine heads guarded the table and roared beneath the fireplace mantel". (Michael J. Lewis, "Frank Furness, Architecture & the Violent Mind", 2001).
A table top with an identical border to the that on the present lot, but on a base apparently by R.J. Horner, sold at Thomaston auctions in ME, in 2012 for $80,000.