The seat, with palm-flowered Egyptian lioness monopodia, is conceived in the antique manner promoted around 1800 by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d. 1842), author of Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1807. Its form and proportions may indicate that it was originally intended as a banquette for a recess and to be plinth-supported in the Roman manner indicated in an 1804 chaise-longue pattern published in George Smith's Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1808, pl. 66. There is a bergere with similar lion monopodia on the front at Stratfield Saye, Hampshire (illustrated in Stratfield Saye House, Guidebook, p. 7).