A William and Mary Inlaid Walnut Demilune Games Table, Circa 1690

Percival D. Griffiths

Mrs William Levis, Toledo, Ohio

Judge Irwin Untermyer, donated to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1964

Deaccessioned and sold Clars Auction Gallery, Oakland, California 19 March 2017, lot 7406

John Gloag and Yvonne Hackenbroch, English Furniture. The Collection of Irwin Untermyer, Metropolitan Museum, New York 1958, p.47 and plate 196 fig. 233

Christian Jussel, English Furniture 1680-1760. The Percival D. Griffiths Collection, Vol.I, New Haven and London 2023, no.F159 p.159

This table bears the distinction of having passed through two of the greatest 20th-century collections of early English furniture and decorative arts. Percival D. Griffiths (1862-1937), a wealthy accountant involved in the expansion of the London-based firm of Deloitte into the United States and South America in the late 19th century, formed a comprehensive collection of early walnut and mahogany furniture under the aegis of the scholar and architect Robert Wemyss Symonds (1889-1958), who advised many of the greatest English connoisseurs in the first half of the 20th century. The New York attorney and judge Irwin Untermyer (1886-1973) was an early and perhaps the most prominent incarnation of furniture collecting 'in the Symonds tradition' in the United States and remains one of the Metropolitan Museum's most important benefactors.

Percival Griffiths possessed another almost identical walnut games table that was reproduced in Symonds's book English Furniture from Charles II to George II (1929), p.128 fig.80 (illustrated in Jussel 2023, F158, p.159).