Card table with concertina action, the rectangular top with rounded, outset corners, above tapering legs with pad feet. The legs are turned and carved in the solid, the frieze and top veneered with cocus wood, with dark heartwood and very light sapwood, arranged in stripes on the frieze and with a saltire pattern on the top, with narrow cross-banding in both dark and light wood.

A concertina-action card table, with large lobed corners supported on long cabriole legs with lapped knees and pad feet. It is veneered with a dark and light stripy wood, and has legs of a solid dark wood -- probably all cocus wood, although the legs may possibly be of a fruitwood such as plum. The top, with the striped veneer arranged diagonally in four quarters, is edged with a narrow feather-banding, within a cross-banded border of alternating wide and narrow dark and light wood, which extends to cover the upright edge -- curiously, on the back edge as well as the front and sides, although this is only visible during the moments when the table is pulled into the room but not yet opened. Similar veneers (with still wider dark bands) are applied to the four frieze rails. The carcase appears to be made of oak throughout -- the veneered top and veneered frieze rails -- except for the legs.

The top folds out to reveal a green-baize-lined interior, with four recesses for holding the players' counters, which are again veneered in light and dark bands; so are the circles at the four lobed corners, in such a way as to form a dark cross defined by pale borders at each corner. When the folding rails are extended, they are each held in place by a hook and ring -- the ring fixed to one half of the rail, the hook to the other, and turned to engage in the ring and straddle the joint so as to prevent the two halves of the rail from folding inwards. The hooks differ from each other, but neither is original; on both sides there is a disused hole for an earlier, slightly longer hook.

The butt hinge at the back of each folding rail is fixed solely to the rail and the short section of frieze extending from the top of the leg (above the ear), so that when the legs are extended the hinge lies in a straight line (rather than being at an angle as it would if one leaf were fixed to the back rail); the hinge leaves are consequently very narrow. The leaves of each hinge taper in thickness towards the outer edges, and each leaf is fixed by one central screw and four nails. The quadrant hinges securing the two halves of each folding rail to each other are fixed entirely with nails.

The baize has been renewed. The back left leg has been damaged and repaired.

Given by Eric M. Browett

This table was given to the Museum in 1937 by Eric M. Browett, 29 George Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham. The acquisition is recorded in Registered Papers 3429/37.

Given by Eric Browett in memory of his wife. Mr Browett gave more than twenty pieces of English furniture, mostly of the second half of the eighteenth century (W.46 to W.74-1937). Most of the pieces were shown together in Gallery 44 on first acquisition (neg. no. 77456).

The heavily striped wood of which this table is veneered is now identified as cocus wood or Jamaican ebony (its botanical name: Brya ebenus) but for many years was identified as laburnum. See Adam Bowett's article listed below under references for discussion of the timber. The card tables listed below are so close in design that they may have come from a single workshop.

Tables with similarly striped arrangements of veneer are shown in P. Macquoid and R. Edwards, Dictionary of English Furniture, vol. 3, 1927, p. 188, fig.10 (on a card table from Ickworth Park) and on a dressing table illustrated by R.W. Symonds, English Furniture (1929), fig. 57 (coming from the Percival Griffiths Collection). A card table of the same wood is in the collections at Temple Newsam House, Leeds (illustrated in Christopher Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall (Leeds: 1978), vol. II, cat no. 383, pp. 312-3), but the wood was identified at that time as 'laburnum'.

Similarly striped veneers on a card table illustrated in the saleroom column of Country Life 14 August 1986, was described as 'laburnum'. Other cocus-wood tables have appeared in the saleroom at Christie's, 5 April 2001 (the Humphrey Whitbread Collection), lot 365, Christie's 25 November 2004, lot 13. Another, in a Christie's sale of 2009 or 2010 (date not recorded), lot 2, carried the stamp 'ET' on the back rail, with the stamp 'T' on the hinges. Another, possibly cocus but described as 'yew wood and plum' was sold by Bonhams, London, 18 November 2009, lot 57.

A card table with a very similar pattern, but possibly in plum wood (with less distinction between the dark and light areas) was illustrated in an advertisement of Owen Evan-Thomas Ltd, 20 Dover Street, now in the departmental files. Unfortunately this advertisement is not dated by may date from the 1950s.

For a discussion of the whole Browett collection see: Ralph Edwards, 'The Browett Gift of English Furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum', Country Life, 9 October 1937, p. 380-381.

Card playing was an essential element for social life in the eighteenth century, and the equipment for it, from card tables to boxes for gaming counters, was often ambitiously decorated. This table, which may have been made as one of a pair, is veneered in cocus wood. That wood, also known as Jamaican ebony, had the botanical name Brya ebenus. Its chief attraction was the strong contrast between the dark, ebony-like heartwood, and the very light, creamy sapwood, at the edge of the tree. Less expensive versions of such decoration could be achieved using plum wood and a card table veneered in plum is also in the collections (W.64-1962).

W.51-1937