The use of an eagle as a support for a table was popularised in England by William Kent (1685/6 - 1748), the remarkable designer of furniture, objects, landscapes and architect. Kent’s designs drew on his decade in Italy from 1709-1719, spent mostly in the studio of the painter G. B. Chiari. On one of these last trips he travelled - at breakneck speed - with his fellow Yorkshireman (both were from the East Riding) Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753) who was to provide patronage for Kent throughout his architectural career: Kent rose to the position of Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Works in the Office of Works, the department of the Royal Household responsible for architecture and buildings.
Kent’s design for an eagle table support is likely to be derived from designs by Giovanni Giardini, published in Disegni Diversi, 1714 - in particular an elaborate table which featured an eagle with spread wings in the centre. Kent later used this design in an engraved tailpiece for Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, 1725-26. The earliest recorded eagle tables of this type were made for the Duke of Beaufort, between 1728-1733 by John Phillips, a carver, who was paid £444 9s 6d for work at Badminton House, Gloucestershire. Thomas Moore wrote to Dudley Ryder in 1734 about “an Eagle frame and Top Carved and guilded in burnished gold” which cost £12 (see catalogue entry to the pair of eagle tables in the Victoria & Albert Museum W.21-1945.1-2). Benjamin Goodison (1700-1767), whose workshop was at the ‘Golden Spread Eagle’ on Long Acre was one cabinet-maker who made furniture designed by Kent at Kensington Palace for George I (eg. the frame for Tintoretto’s The Muses RCIN 7405476) and for Frederick, Prince of Wales, probably at The White House, Kew (designed by Kent). While no eagle tables are known to have been made by Goodison, a pair of eagle tables was supplied around 1725 for Dudley North, at Glemham Hall, Suffolk (see Christie’s London, 12 November 1998, lot 80 - sold £150,000).
