Elder Wing of Australian Art: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 4 of 15

Not all furniture is designed purely with function in mind. This elaborately crafted marquetry table, created around 1877, was conceived less as a card table and more as an exhibition piece, to showcase the skills of its South Australian makers. It is a tour de force of the cabinetmaker’s art.

Its style is that of a ‘loo table’, common in the eighteenth and nineteenth century for playing the card game loo. As with most loo tables, this example has a hinge mechanism that allows the top to fold into a vertical position, for easy storage when not in use. What distinguishes it from similar tables, however, is the intricacy of its geometric marquetry inlay – its top and pedestal legs are inlaid with an estimated 30,000 pieces of native timbers, including Australian cedar, pine, stringybark, red gum and black gum.

The table was created by Heinrich Hugentobler and Conrad Sturm, whose brief cabinetmaking partnership operated from a workshop in the Adelaide Hills at Blumberg, now called Birdwood. Local newspaper reports from the time indicate that Hugentobler, a Swiss joiner, was the table’s designer and principal maker, with assistance from Sturm, a talented Adelaide-born cabinetmaker of German descent. As an indication of the amount of labour that went into its creation, the table was initially valued at 260 pounds – roughly the sum that a skilled cabinetmaker would earn in a year and a half – although it was later offered for sale at less than a third of that amount.

Almost immediately after its completion early in 1878, the table went on display in Adelaide at the Chamber of Manufactures in Waymouth Street, and soon after it was exhibited at Adelaide’s Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Show. The following year it was shown at the Sydney International Exhibition, then a year later at the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880. Such annual exhibitions in the late nineteenth century were an opportunity for producers and manufacturers in diverse fields to show off their wares and skills to a broader domestic and international audience, it also showcased national pride. As desired, the table generated considerable publicity for Hugentobler and Sturm in the Adelaide and Sydney press, although not all of it was positive: one Sydney critic lauded their craftsmanship but considered the elaborate inlay design to be a little over-the-top.