This drawing-room chair has serpentined cartouche backs in the French 'cabriolet' fashion introduced in the 1760s by cabinet-makers such as John Cobb (d. 1788), and later engraved in T. Malton's Compleat Treatise on Perspective, 1775 (pl. 33, fig. 131). The arched crests of its reeded and antique-fluted frame celebrates lyric poetry with laurel-festooned Roman medallions displaying Apollo's sunflowers. More laurels issue from Roman acanthus cartouches on the arms and centers and corners of the seat-rails while foliage wreathing the columnar legs includes triumphal palms. Such laurelled medallions and richly carved legs appear around 1769 on tables designed by Matthias Lock Junior, author of A New Book of Foliage, 1769 and A New Book of Pier-Frames, Ovals, Gerandoles, Tables etc., 1769 (P. Ward- Jackson, English Furniture Designs, London, 1958, figs. 252-253). Similar palm-wreathed legs, accompanying sunflowered tablets, feature on drawing room chairs supplied in 1773 for Northumberland House, London and bearing the name of the Soho cabinet-maker and upholsterer James Cullen (d. 1779) (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1660-1840, Leeds, 1996, figs. 267 and 268). It is also closely related to the documented suite made for Sir Thomas Rumbold for the drawing room at Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire, circa 1780, originally comprising eight armchairs, two larger armchairs, two bergères, a settee, four stools and a music stool; most of which remain in the park today. Another closely related chair, with frame enriched with ribbon-guilloche, forms part of the Marquess of Hertford's collection at Ragley Hall, Warwickshire (English Life Publications Ltd, Ragley Hall, 1993, p. 11). A chair of the present pattern in the possession of J. D. Phillips is illustrated in H. Cescinsky, English Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, vol. III, 1909, fig. 245). A bergère of this pattern was on the Art Market in the early 1990s. A settee of this pattern, but with upholstered cresting, was in the collection of Arthur Hill at Denton Hall, Yorkshire (C. Hussey, 'Denton Hall', Country Life, 4 November 1939, p. 471, fig. 4). For a similar pair, see Christie's, London, 10 November 2005, Lots 340 and 341, now in a private collection.
Post Lot Text
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