BY CRACE & CO., CIRCA 1855, AFTER THE DESIGNS OF A.W.N. PUGIN

This table forms part of an important group of Gothic Revival octagonal marquetry tables that illustrate and result from the successful collaboration from circa 1842-52 between the designer Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52), ‘perhaps the greatest of all architect-designers of the Gothic Revival’, and the decorating/furniture-making firm of John Gregory Crace (1809-89) of 14 Wigmore Street, Cavendish Square, London (Aldrich, 2001, op. cit., p. 48).

Pugin was the maverick designer, well-versed in the medieval idiom, while the Crace firm, established in 1768, were decorators to the Royal family, most notably at Brighton Pavilion where Frederick Crace was the Prince Regent’s decorator. Almost all of Crace’s furniture in the Gothic Revival style was produced exclusively from Pugin’s designs, and, as these design sketches were done at speed and with little detail, it was Crace who interpreted and developed the designs (Wedgwood, 1990, op. cit., p. 138). In the Pugin/Crace partnership, Gothic furniture was to become a fundamental bedrock of their business. During the 1840s and 50s, Gothic furniture including octagonal tables, some with marquetry, such as the one offered here, became the firm’s leading manufacture at their London premises, and were generally produced in oak and walnut.

One of the first joint commissions was for Pugin’s own house, The Grange, at Ramsgate, Kent, which the designer saw as a preliminary ‘show house’ for prospective clients (Aldrich, 2001, op. cit., p. 49). However, the most important by far was the interior decoration of the Houses of Parliament, undertaken in conjunction with Charles Barry, from 1844-45. Thereafter, Pugin and Crace worked for a number of aristocratic patrons, including: Colonel Middleton Biddulph at Chirk Castle, Clywd (1846-47), Earl Somers at Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire (1849-50), and the 6th Duke of Devonshire at Lismore, Co. Waterford. The Gothic Revival was celebrated and propagated yet further at the 1851 Great Exhibition, London, in the Medieval Court - a dedicated exhibition space given to Pugin.

In his early career, Pugin included designs for Gothic octagonal tables in his published works: on the title page of Pugin’s Gothic Furniture, published by Rudolph Ackermann in 1827, and in his Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century (1835). The marquetry design of the octagonal table-top is illustrative of Pugin’s development of elaborate marquetry designs. It features the bold combination of marquetry set in contrast with darker ground timber common to this series of tables and employed to great effect to the oak octagonal table, now in the Portsmouth City Museum, which can be dated to c. 1849, based on several unidentified designs for tables by Pugin that were sent to Crace (Wedgwood, 1985, op. cit., p. 262, cat nos. 779-81). Pugin's bold polychromatic watercolour design for a related border, which is held in the collection of The Victoria & Albert Museum, is signed and dated 1850, a time that Aldrich (op. cit.) records that Pugin 'devoted a number of designs to working out the form, materials and ornamentation of the table for the Medieval Court, and states that on that occasion Crace followed the unusually detailed designs much more closely, suggesting the importance that both designer and maker placed on the success of this important table as a manifestation of the very best that the partnership could produce.

This mode of decoration can also be found to the top of a walnut and oak octagonal table made for the Drawing Room at Abney Hall, Cheshire, supplied in April 1853 (ibid., pp. 54-55, figs. 10-11; Victoria & Albert Museum, CIRC.334-1958), and on another octagonal walnut table made in 1853 for Leighton Hall, Welshpool, both tables having been made by Crace using the designs of Pugin after his death in 1852 (ibid., p. 55, fig. 12).

The present table was created as part of a suite of Gothic furniture commissioned by Thomas Tutton Knyfton (1798-1887), who employed J.G. Crace in 1855 to remodel the drawing room, octagonal hall and tower of his house Uphill Manor, Weston-Super-Mare in the 'High-Gothic' style (Aldrich, 2001, op. cit., p. 55). Knyfton had purchased Uphill in 1853 and commissioned the table as a wedding present for his second wife, Georgina Colston (d. 1887), whom he married in 1855. The table was to remain at Uphill Manor with the family until sold from the estate Miss Edith Marjorie Graves-Knyfton in 1992.

This table belongs to the small group of important octagonal tables produced by J.G. Crace based on the designs of A.W.N. Pugin, made both during the 1850s in Pugin's own lifetime and after his death, with Crace's continuing posthumous use and reinterpretation of Pugin’s designs in the Gothic style, something which the firm would successfully continue into the 1860s.