Painted Duncan Phyfe Kidney Coffee Table, Brass Paw Feet, c. 1935–1955

The Piece

A low kidney shaped coffee table in the Duncan Phyfe manner, with a single drawer in the frieze, twin turned columns rising from a shaped platform, and four reeded sabre legs ending in cast brass lion paw caps.

The top is a long serpentine oval, pinched in at the centre of the front so the outline reads as a kidney rather than a plain ellipse, with a moulded edge that follows every curve. The apron below it carries a run of rope moulding along its lower edge and a small applied rosette block at each corner where the curve turns.

The drawer is the centrepiece. Its front is worked with a flowing foliate scroll, pierced open on either side of the pull and standing proud of the ground, and the whole ornament has been picked out in a warm coral against the green so the pattern reads from across a room. A small brass bail hangs from a turned rosette at the middle of it.

Underneath, two turned columns carry the top down to a shaped lower platform that echoes the kidney of the top. From the platform four legs sweep out and down, reeded along their whole length, each shod in a cast brass paw with a caster behind it.

The finish is a soft apple green, hand applied and rubbed back over a coral ground and down to bare wood along every edge, every moulding and every high point, so the colour sits differently depending on where the light falls.

History & Provenance

Two things date this table, and neither is its style.

The first is what it is. A low table meant to stand in front of a sofa was not an ordinary American domestic object until the later 1920s, and it did not become standard equipment in a living room until the 1930s. Before that, tables in a parlour stood at chair height or higher. A coffee table at this height, in this shape, cannot be earlier than that, whatever the ornament on it suggests.

The second is how it is made. The twin column support on a shaped platform, the splayed reeded sabre legs and the cast brass paw caps with casters are the Duncan Phyfe revival vocabulary that ran through American factory furniture from roughly 1930 into the early 1950s. The ornament on the drawer and the rosettes at the apron corners are moulded and applied rather than cut by hand, which is what a production shop did in those years. By the later 1950s the low table had gone modern and this whole language was finished.

The green is later than the table, and the table proves it itself. Turn it over and the underside of the lower platform was never painted: the original mahogany toned finish is still there, and written across it in blue ink is a number, 1265, with a set of initials beneath. That is a previous inventory or lot mark rather than a maker's mark, and it is offered as what it is.

The drawer tells the same story from the inside. Its bottom is a single wide panel still carrying the original dark stain, scuffed and speckled from long use, while the sides are green only on the outside faces where the brush reached. The paint went on with the piece already assembled, by somebody decorating rather than restoring.

That is worth saying plainly rather than glossing. This is a mid century American factory table wearing a considered later paint finish, and the value in it is the shape, the brass and the colour rather than an untouched original surface.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Coffee tables are hard to buy because most of them are rectangles and a rectangle does nothing for a room. This one is a curve from every angle, and a curved low table in front of a sofa is what stops a seating group looking like a waiting area.

The colour is the reason to move on it. Apple green is a difficult thing to get right, and it is right here because it was rubbed back rather than left flat, so the coral underneath warms it and the bare wood at the edges keeps it from reading as a craft project. Against cream linen, natural wood, brass and old porcelain it does the work a rug usually has to do.

The details reward being close to it. Brass paws under reeded legs, a rope moulding running the whole apron, and a scrolled drawer front picked out in coral are a lot of incident for a table this size, and they are what make it photograph well from any direction.

It is also useful in the ordinary way. The drawer takes coasters, remotes and the things that otherwise live on the surface, the lower platform holds books or a tray, and the casters mean a table of this weight moves when the room needs it to.

For a dealer, painted case and occasional pieces in this palette move faster than brown furniture and they photograph better in a booth. This one has the brass and the shape to hold its price rather than becoming another green table.