Each with inverted heart-shaped padded back and shaped seat, covered in pale green buttoned silk, the back with lotus-leaf moulded frame centred by a palmette, the lotus-leaf carved seat-rail on turned tapering fluted front legs and baluster feet, with moulded backswept rear legs with scroll feet, regilt, with exposed back strut, the seat-rails with batten carrying-holes and cramp-cuts, with limewood rails, redecorated
33³⁄₄ in. (85.5 cm.) high; 22¹⁄₄ in. (56.5 cm.) wide; 19 in. (48.5 cm.) deep

Dealing In Excellence: A Celebration Of Hotspur And Jeremy; Sold Christie's, London 20 November, 2008, lot 63,
where acquired by the present owner.

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Lot Essay

The golden chairs, with elegant French cabriolet backs, are designed in Thomas Chippendale's 'antique' manner appropriate for George III Drawing Rooms decorated in the Roman fashion introduced by the Rome-trained court architect Robert Adam (d.1792). With triumphal palm-flowers crowning Roman-medallioned backs, which are sculpted with palm-leaves in bas-relief, they relate to the Music Room chair-pattern probably invented around 1770 by the pattern-book author Chippendale Junior for Harewood House, Yorkshire (see C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, 1978, fig. 190). At this period the St. Martin's Lane firm had also introduced Grecian hollowed base-rails derived no doubt from the palmette-frames wreathing the Erechtheion columns (see James Stuart's Antiquities of Athens, 1762). However the chairs' antique-fluted columnar legs have altar-hollowed capitals, which are more in the French fashion introduced by Chippendale Junior in one of his cabriole elbow chair drawings dating from the mid-1770s.