A Regency brass mounted marble, bronzed and gilt cast-iron gueridon, attributed to William and George Bullock, circa 1815

Christie’s London, 15 November 2017, lot 93

This table is one of only a handful of identified examples whose cast-iron eagle-form legs match a design that was patented by William Bullock in 1805, and for which a drawing by his brother George Bullock also survives. These tables adopt a classicising athénienne form that was a highly fashionable part of many Regency and Empire interiors, but were also a clear innovation as an exceptionally early example of the use of cast iron in furniture.

The well-preserved corpus of drawings by George Bullock known as the ‘Wilkinson Tracings’ includes an unmistakably matching tripod stand or guéridon (1974M3.39), whose eagle-form supports evidently form the basis for several identified table bases. They differ in material, the distance between the three legs and sometimes the presence of a central shaft, but the individual design of the leg combined with the patented use of cast iron makes it highly likely that they were all produced by George Bullock.

George’s working relationship with his brother William, a dealer who often worked with furniture, varied throughout both of their careers. While the design in the Wilkinson Tracings is in George’s hand, it is William who patented the eagle-head cast-iron design in 1805,¹ and whose initial appears in the stamp for several cast-iron pieces. However, a pair of stands with this eagle-head leg design that were made for Hinton House and bear the stamp W. BULLOCK PUB. 1 JUNE 1805 were also invoiced by George on 18th June 1814.² Both brothers retailed tripods during their careers, and tripods apparently matching this design can be seen in the prints of William’s famous project, the Egyptian Gallery on Piccadilly. The double attribution that is typical in the cataloguing of this eagle-head model reflects the ambiguity of the sources around this collaboration.

The period of nine years between the patent (and the date on the stamp) and the invoice for the Hinton House tables makes it circumstantially very plausible that various models incorporating this leg were made by the Bullocks in the meantime. Aside from the present lot and the Hinton example named above (which is now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), other such examples have appeared at Christie’s in 2006, on the market in The Connoisseur in 1968 and with Blairman in 1996, the latter of which had reputed provenance to the 6th Duke of Devonshire.³ During the 1819 stock-in-trade sale after Bullock’s death, there was even an entry for a “A tripod-stand, supported by cast-metal eagle silvered standards”.⁴

The marble or hardstone tops of these tables all vary in the design and the stones chosen, but this is the only example to feature pietre dure inlay depicting the typical Florentine-style subjects of flora and fauna. Bullock owned a quarry in Anglesey and used its supplies of green serpentine stone for many of the luxurious slab tops on his case furniture. This was often dubbed ‘Mona marble’ after the Latin name for Anglesey, which is close to its Welsh name Môn. There are even entire chimneypieces by Bullock in ‘Mona marble’,⁵ and the sale of unworked or unfinished workshop materials that followed Bullock’s death includes a lot of “One hundred pieces of green Mona marble, calculated for tripod and small table tops”, followed by three lots of “A pile of ditto”.⁶ Though predominantly green, an 1816 work also notes that it can be “reddish” in colour,⁷ though Bullock may have satisfied his preference for native British materials with the ‘Elvan’ porphyry typically quarried in Cornwall.

¹ M. Levy, ‘The Roman Gallery at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, and some Tripods by William Bullock and George Bullock’, Furniture History, vol XXXIII, 1997, p.p.236.

² Ibid., p.236. The date for this statement comes from George Bullock’s statement of the 28th December 1814.

³ Christie’s London, Out of the Ordinary: The Discerning and Individual Taste of Christopher Gilbbs and Harris Lindsay, 10th May 2006, lot 55. This example with four legs, a ball under the claw feet and later modifications by Robert Blake

The Connoisseur, September 1968, back cover

H. Blairman & Sons, Furniture and Works of Art, 1996, cat.8.

⁴ Levy, op. cit., p.236.

⁵ C. Wainwright (ed), George Bullock: Cabinet Maker, London, 1988, p.120.

⁶ Lots 90-94 of the third day of the ‘stock-in-trade’ sale, 15th May 1819. Reproduced in M. Levy, ‘George Bullock’s Partnership with Charles Fraser, 1813-1819, and the Stock-in-Trade Sale, 1819’, Furniture History, 1989, p.91.

⁷ Quoted in C. Wainwright, ‘George Bullock and his Circle’ , in George Bullock: Cabinet Maker, London, 1988, p.21.