A George I gilt-gesso side table, the rectangular re-entrant top centred by a floral medallion amongst foliage and arabesque strapwork on a punched ground, the frieze carved with shells and acanthus, raised on similarly carved and punched square-section cabriole legs terminating in braganza feet.
The gilt-gesso furniture produced in the first decades of the 1700s was some of the most opulent of the century, made to occupy prime positions in magnificent rooms of state and parade and to enrich the sumptuous private apartments of royalty and nobility alike. The present table, jewel-like in its smaller scale, was made for a private room of Ombersley Court, the Dressing Room, adjacent to the Velvet Bedchamber, where it was recorded in its pier between the windows in the 1755 inventory of the house.
The quality of the table suggests the authorship of a leading maker. It bears close resemblance to another at John Belchier’s most significant known commission, Erddig Hall, which is carved very similarly on the frieze with shells and acanthus leaves, and the possible connection is strengthened by the survival at Ombersley of a group of gesso mirrors that compares with the documented pier glasses supplied by him to Erddig in 1723 and 1726, also the period when Ombersley was built.
The nature of the flower-carvings on the earpieces of the present table, however, evokes the work of James Moore, perhaps the most renowned maker of furniture of this type, raising the possibility of his authorship. Indeed, Belchier’s bill for the gesso table at Erddig does not survive and so perhaps it was made by one of the other makers John Meller employed, namely John Pardoe and John Gumley, the latter of whom was Moore’s partner.
The table was made for Samuel Sandys, later Baron Sandys, a man so much the enemy of Sir Robert Walpole that on his retirement in 1742 the great Frist Minister chose the name Orford for his title, ‘as an act of homage to one whose presence had cast a considerable shadow over the great prime minister’s political apprenticeship’, D. W. Hayton wrote in The History of Parliament. Horace Walpole noted: ‘Sandys is very angry at his taking the title of Orford, which belonged to his wife’s great-uncle. You know a step of that nature cost the great Lord Strafford his head, at the prosecution of a less bloody-minded man than Sandys’.