Gilt Metal Table with Marble Top and Pugin Style Design

• Pugin - Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, (1812-52) was an architect and designer and leader of the Gothic Revival movement which was so important an influence on Victorian taste. His father had an architectural drawing school, and artists from that school, including Pugin, then 15 years old, were employed to make drawings of the furniture to be taken to Windsor palace. Later in the year he was employed to design and make working drawings of furniture for the palace. He also designed silver for the royal goldsmiths Rundell Bridge & Rundell. By the 1830s he was insisting on historical accuracy, and published a number of influential books on the Gothic style. He was responsible for furniture in the Houses of Parliament (1836-7) the design of the tower that houses Big Ben. He became a Catholic in 1833, and he and his son Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75) designed and built several churches. In his short life, he married three times. After his death Pugin's two sons, Edward Welby Pugin and Peter Paul Pugin, continued operating their father's architectural firm under the name Pugin & Pugin.
• Victorian Period - The Victorian period of furniture and decorative arts design covers the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. There was not one dominant style of furniture in the Victorian period. Designers used and modified many historical styles such as Gothic, Tudor, Elizabethan, English Rococo, Neoclassical and others, although use of some styles, such as English Rococo and Gothic tended to dominate the furniture manufacture of the period.
  
  The Victorian period was preceded by the Regency and William IV periods, and followed by the Edwardian period, named for Edward VII (1841 ? 1910) who was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Emperor of India for the brief period from 1901 until his death in 1910.
• Scrolls - Serpentine-shaped forms, used in cabinet construction and decoration for centuries. The scroll appears in legs, feet, as carving in chair brackets, chair rails and arms. The deeper and more spontaneous the carving is, the earlier the piece is likely to be. The Regency or 'Thomas Hope' scroll, used on pediments and sideboard backs, consists of two scrolls on the horizontal plane, placed back to back in a mirror image, and sometimes decorated with a variety of carved and/or applied ornament, such as shells, foliate and other motifs. Chippendale-style furniture is often distinguished by two corresponding scrolls in the form of a 'C' in the upper splat or where chair legs join the seat rail.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• tables, marble top - marble top 133
• tables, purpose or type - gilt 86