This exquisite pair of George III semi-elliptical side tables is attributed to the pre-eminent and fashionable Golden Square cabinet-makers William Ince (d.1804) and John Mayhew (d.1811) who ranked George III, the 6th Earl of Coventry, and the Earl of Kerry among their distinguished clients. It typifies the elegant 'antique' style established by the country's leading Neoclassical architect, Robert Adam (d.1792), popularised in a drawing of January 1773 for an 'Etruscan' commode for the Duke of Bolton and published in Adam's Works in Architecture (1773-77). From 1764, Ince & Mayhew worked with Adam on several notable commissions, culminating in their 'ability to produce very early on furniture in the most startling advanced Neo-classical taste' (Geoffrey Beard, Christopher Gilbert, Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660-1840, Leeds, 1986, p.592).
The spare and crisply drawn ‘antique’ marquetry of the tops, with laurel swags, rinceau scrolls and rosettes issuing from a fan-shaped palmette, typifies the Adam-inspired neo-classical vocabulary of the 1770s and 1780s and is a leitmotif of Ince and Mayhew’s work, for instance on a pair of commodes supplied to Robert Birch of Turvey House, Count Dublin (sold Christie’s, London, 5 July 2012, lot 33, £746,850). The distinctive carved ribbon-tied drapery swags of the frieze also feature on the pedestals from a dining room suite supplied by Ince and Mayhew to Sir Cecil Bisshopp for Parham Park, Sussex, and later in the collections of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman (recently offered from the collection of John and Susan Gutfreund, Christie’s, New York, 26-27 January 2021, lots 49-50).