E. W. Godwin. A highly important Anglo-Japanese sidetable.

An important Anglo-Japanese side table designed by E. W. Godwin. Circa 1872. Made by Collinson and Lock. When I bought this table in the early 1990's there were only two other examples known. One was in the Ellen Terry museum in Small Hythe Place. Kent and the other was in The Modern Museum of New York, both had metal adornments and metal sabots. The one I found was plain and free from metal adornments. I then spent two years researching Godwin's architectural drawings and his original sketchpads held at the Victoria and Albert Museum London, donated in 1963 by his son Gordon Craig. On a late Friday afternoon I found the original design in Godwin's own hand, that design has no metal adornments and related exactly to the plain unadorned table I had found which would suggest the plain version is the earlier design. I consigned it to Sotheby's where it sold for £43,000. Since then a handful of other tables of this design has surfaced.