CULHAM HOUSE
These spectacularly refined pier tables once formed part of a suite of furniture, which also included eight armchairs and three window seats, supplied by the fashionable Berkeley Square cabinet-maker John Linnell (d. 1796) for Culham House, Oxfordshire.

Culham House was the Oxfordshire property of John Phillips (d. 1775), a celebrated master carpenter, architect, Mayfair developer, and Lord of the Manor of Blewbury, Berkshire (H. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, 3rd ed., London, 1995, p. 751). Phillips had no children, and after his death Culham House passed to his brother's descendants, who continued to live there until 1935. That year, the present tables and the rest of the suite were sold in the house sale conducted at Culham by Sotheby's, 9-11 April 1935, lots 83-85.

JOHN LINNELL AND THE NEO-CLASSICAL DESIGN OF THE SUITE
John Linnell studied French ornament at the St. Martin's Lane Academy before working for his father, whose cabinet-making and upholstery workshops in Berkeley Square he inherited in 1763. By the mid-1760s, Linnell showed a growing interest in Neo-classical form and ornament. His designs from these years reveal the influence of the architect-designer Robert Adam, who worked on many of the same houses as Linnell, including Robert Child's Osterley Park, William Drake's Shardeloes, and Lord Scarsdale's Kedleston Hall.

A suite of seat and writing furniture supplied by Linnell to Robert Child for Osterley Park, circa 1768-1769, exhibits the same strongly patterned contrasting timbers and squared legs with slight inset angles. The backs of the eight Osterley chairs are inlaid with portrait medallions arranged in facing pairs. The Culham chairs are comparable: their backs display floral arrangements in reversed pairs.

In the late 1760s, Linnell employed the specialist inlaying skills of the Paris-trained Swedish ébénistes Christopher Fuhrlohg (d. c. 1787), later cabinet-maker to George, Prince of Wales, and Georg Haupt, later cabinet-maker to the King of Sweden. A commode at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, designed by Linnell with related marquetry of a laurel-festooned vase, bears Fuhrlohg's signature and the date 1767 (H. Hayward & P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980, vol. II, p. 53, figs. 108-109).

The Culham pier tables are of hollow-sided form and inlaid with laurel-wreathed and palm-fronded portrait medallions. They are mounted with ormolu laurel festoons, which also appear on other pieces supplied by Linnell. Examples include the card tables for the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle (ibid., fig. 280) and for Lord Scarsdale at Kedleston Hall (ibid., fig. 282). The laurel mount was clearly inspired by a French marquetry bureau plat inlaid à la grecque and attributed to Jacques Dubois. It was supplied in 1765 to Linnell's patron, the 6th Earl of Coventry, through the marchand-mercier Simon-Philippe Poirier, and was later copied by Linnell (ibid., fig. 276).

The Grecian-fretted brackets heading the legs of the present tables match those on the Osterley chairs. Linnell's wall elevation for an 'Eating or Back Parlour', showing a window pier with a tripod console table beneath a vase-capped mirror, may have been an early proposal for Culham (ibid., fig. 287). It is also likely that the Culham vase-splat chairs were intended to be upholstered in floral needlework, like those made for the Breakfast Parlour at Osterley Park.