sideboard table, unknown maker from Ireland

Archive Label: "Empire of Things," 2012, Raechel Cook. Travel greatly informed interior and furniture design in 18th-century England and Ireland. Irish architect and designer Edward Lovett Pearce returned to Dublin in the late 1720s, bringing with him the neoclassical influences he had seen during his three-year journey throughout Italy and France. This mahogany table’s relief carving of a floral basket flanked by acanthus leaves, birds, and fruit emulates imagery found on the column capitals and stair banisters Pearce designed in his Dublin buildings. Mahogany was first imported to England from Jamaica in the early 1700s and slowly replaced walnut as the preferred wood for elaborate carving. It became commercially available to craftsmen in Great Britain after the English Parliament passed the Naval Stores Act in 1720, making timber trade profitable for merchants. However, Ireland was prohibited from directly importing foreign goods under the Navigation Actions of 1696 and probably obtained mahogany through England. Archive Label 2003 and 1999: This table was probably made in Dublin and intended for the home of a wealthy Irish land- holder or the expanding exports market to the American colonies. Mahogany began to replace walnut in the 1720s as the preferred wood for the elaborate carving that was a part of the early eighteenth-century style.