The original tooled leather inset top above a frieze with gothic tracery with one long and one short drawer, on four bold pillars depicting the gothic influence of cluster column and architectural elements, on a tri-form platform base. The table is stamped with an inventory number 7706, and there is a very old, and torn paper label on the underside of the table, which reads ‘Lady Dunsany……..hy’.

Dunsany Castle:

The Gothic Library at Dunsany Castle was created in 1826; it is thought to have been worked on by James Shiel, is one of the star features of Dunsany. Displaying a form of the “Gothic Revival” style, it has a wonderful “beehive” ceiling from the early 19th century and grained Gothic decoration. Following the death of his first wife in 1814 or 1815 the 14th Baron Dunsany married again in 1823. He married the Hon. Eliza Kinnaird, daughter of the 7th Lord Kinnaird, a wealthy banker who devoted his life to collecting art. Eliza had a considerable fortune and spent it liberally on improvements to Dunsany Castle.

It is thought the George Smith table was acquired circa 1810 and inspired the creation of the Gothic Library in 1826.

There is still a brown grisaille mural painting in a recess on the wall opposite the chimney piece in the library which imitates Smith’s design for the end of the table (see Country Life, June 3rd 1971).

George Smith: George Smith’s 1808 publication, A Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, was reprinted by Praeger in 1970. In the introduction, Constance V. Hershey describes the design for this writing table as “a masterpiece of incongruity”. The present table is the only known execution of this extraordinary design which blends the cusped arches, cluster cloumns, trefoils and quatrefoils of the Gothic mode with the modern format of the library table. The choice of English oak as the material reiterates the celebration of native old English style highlighted by the design. As Hershey points out “Smith’s [Regency] Gothic seems to stand in spirit, as it does in time, somewhere between the frivolous and whimsical eighteenth century “Rococco-Gothic” of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, and the measured earnestness of Augustus Charles Pugin’s reverential and reforming gothic of the 1830’s.” George Smith himself describes the collection of designs in the Collection thus: “the work displays a variety of the newest patterns, combined with classical taste, for the plainest and for the most superb articles of modern furniture, studied from the best antique examples of the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman styles; and to augment this variety, some designs are given after the Gothic or old English fashion…”.