A pair of Roman carved marble table supports, circa 1626, now supporting a George II inscribed top dated 1754

Each end support carved on one face with The Earl of Arundel's heraldic achievements, with a gules á bend within a garter ribbon inscribed HOH [sic] / [sic] SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE below a coronet and supported by horses with flowing manes , above an arched moulded scrolled base, the sides formed as tapered scrolled pilasters with stopped fluting and imbrications, the reverse sides with swags of drapery  linked by a void oval above a scrolled molded arch surmounted by Talbots, The Countess of Arundel's crest, above a foliate seed pod, and flanked by stylized shells, formerly inlaid with coloured marbles.



The associated rectangular top inscribed: To the Memory of Pug who/departed this Life June ye 24 1754/in the third Year of her Age/No Blazond Coat or Sculptard Bone/Honours we scarcely deem our own/Adorn this simple rustick Stone/But Love & Friendship without Blame/With Gratitude we justly claim/When will Faith ever find the same?/Not unlamented now she dies/Besprinkled here this Tribute lies/With heavenly tears from Angels eyes [sic]

Acquired in Rome in Rome, 1626, by Thomas Howard, 14^th Earl of Arundel (1586 - d.1646), for Arundel House, The Strand, London;
Thence by descent to Henry Frederick, 15^th Earl of Arundel (d.1652);
Thomas, Earl of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk, restored as 5^th Duke of Norfolk (d.1677);
Henry Howard, 6^th Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk (d.1684);
Henry 7^th Duke of Norfolk (d.1701), by whom sold to Sir William Fermor Bt., later 1^st  Baron Lempster, (1648-1711), Easton Neston, Northamptonshire

This rare and important carved marble table base is recorded as having been commissioned by Thomas Howard, 14^th Earl of Arundel, circa 1620, possibly from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, and exported from Rome under the auspices of his agent William Smith in 1626. This, together with a rapidly growing collection of marbles, sculpture and paintings was destined for Arundel House, The Strand, London. What was to become Arundel House had been constructed on the site of the medieval town house of the Bishop of Bath and Wells by William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton in 1539, the lease reverting to the Crown on his death in 1542. It was then granted to Thomas Seymour, brother of the Protector, Somerset, in 1545, but after his execution for treason in 1549 it was sold by the Crown to Henry Fitzalan, 12^th Earl of Arundel, for the sum of £40. He was he was succeeded by his grandson, Philip Howard, but he too was also tried for treason being incarcerated in the Tower of London until his death in 1595. Once again the house forfeited to the Crown and then granted in 1603 to Charles, Earl of Nottingham. A somewhat irritated Thomas Howard was then forced to re-purchase the house for the sum of £4,000 stating in a letter to Lord Shrewsbury that he would have much preferred to have spent the money on a number of pictures which were sold after the death of Lady Southampton in 1607. As the 14^th Earl of Arundel, Thomas Howard commenced in 1614 to transform what was now a rambling Tudor building into an Italianate palace.

Called by Horace Walpole the "father of vertu" in England, Arundel began the first of his extensive travels through Europe in 1612 accompanied by Thomas Coke, brother of the more famous Sir Edward Coke, Secretary of State to Charles I. Coke was described by David Howarth (op. cit.) as ‘Shrewsbury’s (Arundel’s father-in law) secretary, apologist and artistic adviser’, continuing that he had begun after 1604 ‘ceaseless journeys all over Europe which continued after he joined the Arundel household, and only ended with his premature death at Padua in 1623’, concluding that ‘it was to be his distinction to nurture the first growth of the Arundel collection’. Arundel first visited Antwerp and Brussels, where the local agents Wake and Trumbull made certain that he should ‘not want the sight of any curiosity’. Continuing south to Venice and then to Padua, he was forced to return to return prematurely to London in November on the death of Prince Henry.

In the following year he and Lady Arundel, having accompanied Princess Elizabeth and her husband to Heidelburg, continued on to Padua accompanied by Inigo Jones. Howard and his entourage remained in Italy until the winter of 1614 visiting such cities as Milan, Venice, Florence, Sienna and Rome where he purchased numerous works of art including antique sculptures and copies of famous sculptures, bronzes, paintings and books, together with other sculptures commissioned from contemporary artists. As Robinson notes (op. cit.), he returned to London from Italy ‘a transformed man, determined to become a cultural patron in the Italian mold’. His secretary in later life, Sir Edward Walker, wrote concerning these visits that Howard ‘was the first subject of the Northern parts who by his conversation and great collection set a value on that country’. 

On his return, Arundel began to rebuild Arundel House intending to transform an out-dated and sprawling Tudor building into a more formal building in the Italianate manner more suitable as a setting for his growing collection. Almost certainly with the collaboration of Inigo Jones, a grandiose scheme was commenced which, although never fully completed, appears in part in contemporary engravings by Wenceslas Hollar (see above). These show a half-built classical range in the courtyard, the river side of the house having a projecting wing with galleries for the display of paintings and sculpture. The gardens were similarly re-modelled in the Italian taste, and were again designed specifically for the display of sculpture, Sir Francis Bacon supposedly crying out on first seeing them before him ‘My Lord, I see Resurrection is upon us’.. Unfortunately there are few contemporary descriptions of the interior and furnishings of Arundel House, although an impression of their magnificence, allowing for some artistic license in the placement of doors and windows, can be seen in the two portraits by Daniel Mytens showing the Earl and Countess seated respectively in the sculpture gallery and the picture gallery. (See: Angellicoussis, op. cit. p.152) The Earl is seated on an X frame chair richly upholstered in Italian silk damask placed on an oriental carpet before a gallery with a barrel vault lined with antique sculptures, some of which can be identified with those now in the Ashmolean Museum, the doorway at the end with an iron balustrade before a vista of the Thames. The Countess is similarly seated before a gallery with a compartmented ceiling, the walls hung with pictures, the open pedimented doorway showing a view of a walled garden. It is within settings such as these, however exaggerated, that the present table supports, richly inlaid and emblazoned with the Howard arms, would have been placed topped by a pietre dure inlaid slab.

In August 1616 Lady Arundel’s father, Gilbert, 7^th Earl of Shrewsbury had died leaving her his extensive estates which stretched across south Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, together with the great mansion of Worksop Manor and bringing to her an income of some 60,000 crowns a year. As David Howarth notes (op.cit.), ‘The Shrewsbury legacy could not have come at a better moment. Italy had broadened the tastes of Arundel and his wife, and they were beginning to buy artefacts which had not been seen in English houses before. For instance, Anthony Tracy, who acted as a sort of unofficial ambassador in Florence where he had been able to help them on their tour, was asked to order pietre dure furniture. Another agent in Arundel’s employ at this time was William Smith, ‘a person of talent and initiative’ (Howarth 0p. cit.), who was a painter in Rome. He appears to have worked assiduously for Arundel over a period of some twenty years before being murdered whilst acting as a trumpeter in his retinue during an embassy to Vienna in 1636. A surviving inventory drawn up by Rome customs officials on January 29, 1626, for items to be shipped to London by Smith clearly illustrates the extent of his purchases on behalf of his patron and as well as some commissioned by Anthony Tracy earlier. The document, written in Italian, states that ‘With the present letter, we allow Mr. William Smit [sic] to export from the State of the Holy Church, the following paintings….’ These included some twenty-five contemporary Flemish landscapes, paintings on canvas depicting apostles and ‘other contemporary gentlemen’, sixteen Flemish landscapes on canvas, twenty various Madonnas, and other various paintings on copper. Works of art included a modern life-size head of Socrates made of metal, four cases of various plasters and modern plasters of legs, torsos, heads, busts and another case of various plasters and modern terracotta figures, various fragments of stone carvings including friezes, garlands and bas- reliefs, five small alabaster vases and modern vases, and ‘a standing figure of Pallade, partly antique and modernly restore’ and various other sculptures including Diana and a bust of Apollo. The document also includes the following entry:  2 piedi intagliati di comesso con l’arme del Sig Conte della Rondella con la sua tavol di 10 palmi lunga et 5 larga di comesso di varie sorte di alabastri at di mischio modernie (2 supports carved/inlaid with the arms of Mr. the Count Rondella (Arundel) together with a modern table top 10 palmi long, 5 wide, inlaid with various alabasters and stones). This clearly refers to the present lot although, of course, the pietra dura inlaid slab has disappeared, and its present whereabouts is unknown.

In their present condition the carving of the stands clearly show that the enclosed panels surrounded by the raised carving, were originally intended to be inset with various inlaid marbles and hard-stones which would have followed the tinctures and details of the depicted arms. Their rough surfaces would have allowed cement to bond the inlay with the base white marble. Although the surface overall is slightly weathered, it would originally have been highly polished, as would the inlay. As objects, they are extremely rare survivals as, although a number of pietra dura inlaid tops of this period survive, very few are recorded on their original bases. From the reference of Arundel’s contact with the agent Anthony Tracy, one assumes that the top with its stands was obtained from the Opifiico delle pietre  dure  which had been established in the Ufizzi by Ferdinando I (1587-1609) as an official workshop in 1588, although similar work was produced in both Rome and Florence. Also, although they are known to have been exported from Rome, Smith is known to have purchased other pieces from different cities which were taken collected for final shipment to Arundel. Although Tracy was commissioned to obtain such works as the present lot some eight years before, the art of manufacturing such pieces is known to have been extremely slow, a table commissioned to mark the marriage of Ferdinand II to Vittoria delle Rovere in 1633, was not completed until 1649. It is therefore not surprising that the present stands and top could well have taken some five years to be completed.             

The original top would have been inlaid with various hard-stones and marbles including chalcedony, various agates, jasper, lapis lazuli, coral and pearl. An almost contemporary example at Hatfield House which is possibly the one mentioned in an inventory of 1621 displays the subtle and inventive manner in which these were cut and polished. This may have been commissioned by the future 2^nd Earl of Salisbury from the Orpificio delle pietre dure when he visited Italy in 1611 (Cornforth op. cit. fig.1) It is interesting that a portrait of the Ist Earl now in the Library at Hatfield can be compared with the description of a portrait in Smith’s inventory. Una figura vestita di marmo retratto del detto Signo Conte. The former is composed of small tesserae of marble inlaid in mosaic to represent the Earl. Dated 1608, it was commissioned by Sir Henry Wotton who wrote ‘…having here caused your picture to be made in mosaic as the best present I could conceive for my Lord Cranbourne, your son…’.

By the early 1640s The Earl of Arundel was in virtual exile. Driven by the unsettled and difficult political conditions in England worsened by the decline of the Royalist fortunes, he quitted England for the final time in February, 1642. Travelling through Europe, he maintained a lively, albeit at times a melancholy correspondence, with various friends including John Evelyn, who was also exiled at this time. In considerable debt, he still took an immense interest in purchasing works of art for his collection. He died in Padua in September 1646.

Despite Arundel House being used as billet for a Roundhead garrison at the time of the civil war it appears to have survived relatively intact. Unfortunately, however, the house and its collection were sadly neglected during the tenure of Henry Howard who obviously did not share the artistic sensitivities of his grandfather. In 1667, by which time a large proportion of the sculptures had been destroyed or seriously damaged, John Evelyn noted in his diary on September 19 that ‘These precious monuments when I saw miserably neglected & scattered up & downe about the Gardens and other places of Arundell-house, & how exceedingly the corrosive aire of London Impaired them, I procured him (Thomas Howard) to bestow on the Universite of Oxford’.

THE LATER HISTORY OF THE TABLE

In 1677 Lord Henry Howard succeeded his brother to the Dukedom of Norfolk and immediately applied for permission from Parliament to demolish Arundel House, intending to develop the portion of the site bordered by the Strand for residential occupancy, and that bordering the Thames to be used for a new house. A further group of marbles, which had remained inside the house, was sold at this time to Thomas Herbert, later 8th Earl of Pembroke, for Wilton House. As there appeared to be no interest in the remaining pieces, these were placed in temporary storage in a part of the garden adjacent to the new Strand development, suffering further from the collapse of a roofed colonnade intended to protect them. Here they remained until the majority of them were sold for the sum of £300 to Sir William Fermor, later Lord Lempster, in 1691, including the present table supports. No document survives which itemizes the part of the Arundel collection purchased by Fermor, although one has to assume that owing to the mistreatment of the sculptures during the previous years, something as fragile as a pietre dure top would have been disassociated from its base. Placed in his recently built seat, Easton Neston, the sculptures remained in the condition in which they had been acquired until after Lempster’s death in 1711. His son Thomas, 1^st Earl Pomfret, then arranged for an Italian sculptor Guelfi to restore them with unfortunate results. A protégé of Lord Burlington, Guelfi ‘misconceived the character and attitude of almost every statue he attempted to make perfect’. Sometime before 1753 the collection was seen by Brian Fairfax (op. cit.) who published in 1757 ‘A Description of Easton Neston’ where the ‘curious antique Statues, Busto’s Urns &c’ were displayed in the garden, ‘The GREEN-HOUSE of STATUES, &c.’, and in the principal rooms of the house. The present lot cannot be identified with any certainty from Fairfax’s descriptions, although ‘The Great Dining-Room’ was furnished with an ‘Antique marble table, and white marble elephant on it’, and the ‘Drawing-room’ with ‘An agate table’.

 In 1753 1^st Earl of Pomfret was succeeded by his son George, the 2^nd Earl. Heavily encumbered by debt, the family was immediately forced to sell by auction some of the contents of the house including the pictures, furniture and the collection of Arundel marbles purchased by his grandfather. As Horace Walpole noted to Mann ‘The seat must be stripped’, purchasing for himself at that time for 85gns.a painting then thought to depict Henry VII and his Queen. Fortunately, the majority of the Arundel marbles were purchased by his mother, Henrietta Louisa, Dowager Countess of Pomfret (see lot 103), an heiress in her own right, who immediately presented them to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in which collection they still remain. Presumably the present lot was not included in the sale, as it did not appear to be ‘antique’ in the context of the remaining marbles as a whole. Presumably by this time the inset richly coloured marbles and hard-stone inlay had been lost and Lord Arundel’s bases suffered a somewhat ignominious fate as supports for a memorial slab to the dog Pug.

Related Literature:

Sir Edward Walker, Historical Discources, 1705;
Brian Fairfax, A Catalogue of the Curious Collection of Pictures of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, also A Catalogue of Sir Peter Lely’s Capital Collection pf Pictures etc., A Description of Easton-Neston in Northamptonshire, A Description of the Cartoons at Hampton Court, A Letter from Mr. I. Talman to Dr. Aldrich, London, MDCCLVIII;
Fabio Gori, Archivio Storico Artistico Archeologico Letterario Romano, Spoleto 1880, Fasicolo 11, pp.74-91;
John Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Easton Neston, Northamptonshire: 2, Its history, the church monuments, the Arundel marbles’, The Connoisseur, 1964, pp.143-149;
David Cecil, The Cecils of Hatfield House, London, 1973, p.60;
D. Haynes, The Arundel Marbles, Ashmolean Museum, 1975;
John Martin Robinson, The Dukes of Norfolk, Oxford, 1983;
David Howarth, Lord Arundel and his Circle, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985;
John Cornforth, ‘Princely Pietra Dura’, Country Life, 1 December 1988, pp.160-165, figs.1;
John Harria and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones – Complete Architectural Drawings, 1989;
Anna Maria Giusti, ‘Rome and Florence: the sixteenth-century beginnings of stone intarsia’, Peitre Dure, London, 1992, pp.9-33;
Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, London, 1995, pp.28-29;
Alvar Gonzàlez-Palacios, Las Colecciones Reales Espanõlas de Mosaicos Y Piedras Duras, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003, p.91;
Elizabeth Angelicoussis, ‘The Collection of Classical Sculptures of the Earl of Arundel, "Father of Vertu in England’’ ’, Journal of the History of Collections, 2004, Vol.16, No.2, pp.144-159