George III Oak Tilt-Top Wine Table

• Baluster (furniture) - An architectural term for a column in a balustrade or staircase, often defined as a "vase shape". The shape is extensively used in furniture and decorative arts.
  
  In furniture, it is used to describe a chair or table leg turned in that form, or more usually as an inverted baluster, with the bulbous section to the top. Less commonly used to describe a chair back that has the outline of a baluster. A baluster may also be split and applied to the front of a cupboard for ornamentation.
  
  For ceramics and silver items it is often used to describe the shape of the whole item, rather than a part.
  
  In Georgian glassware, the shape is commonly seen in the stem of glasses.
• Column - An architectural feature sometimes used for decorative effect and sometimes as part of the supporting construction. Columns should generally taper slightly towards the top. They may be plain or decorated with carving, fluting or reeding. Columns may be fully rounded or, more commonly, half-rounded and attached with glue, screws or pins to the outer stiles of doors, or the facing uprights on cabinets and bureaux.
• Turning - Any part of a piece of furniture that has been turned and shaped with chisels on a lathe. Turned sections include legs, columns, feet, finials, pedestals, stretchers, spindles etc. There have been many varieties and fashions over the centuries: baluster, melon, barley-sugar, bobbin, cotton-reel, rope-twist, and so on. Split turning implies a turned section that has been cut in half lengthwise and applied to a cabinet front as a false decorative support.
• George Iii - George III (1738 - 1820) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760 to 1820.
• Oak - Native to Europe and England, oak has been used for joinery, furniture and building since the beginning of the medieval civilisation. It is a pale yellow in colour when freshly cut and darkens with age to a mid brown colour.
  
  Oak as a furniture timber was superceded by walnut in the 17th century, and in the 18th century by mahogany,
  
  Semi-fossilised bog oak is black in colour, and is found in peat bogs where the trees have fallen and been preserved from decay by the bog. It is used for jewellery and small carved trinkets.
  
  Pollard oak is taken from an oak that has been regularly pollarded, that is the upper branches have been removed at the top of the trunk, result that new branches would appear, and over time the top would become ball-like. . When harvested and sawn, the timber displays a continuous surface of knotty circles. The timber was scarce and expensive and was used in more expensive pieces of furniture in the Regency and Victorian periods.

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• tables, purpose or type - wine 509