CIRCA 1680-1720

This ebony canap is conceived at the end of the 17th Century, when a new style of ebony furniture became fashionable in the Dutch colonies, between circa 1680 and 1720. The main difference from the previous era is the decoration of large sculpturally carved flowers, which is called 'half-relief'. This distinction was already made at the time, as we see from the inventory of Cornelia Linis, the widow of the clergyman Johannes Vermeer, dated 1690, which mentions, in the front room, 'twelve high kaliatur chairs with large flowers'. This new typr of floral decoration was developed around 1680, probably on the Coromandel Coast, and was rapidly introduced in the other Dutch overseas territories. An important factor was, of course, the import of such items of furniture by transferred V.O.C. employees. Another would have been the influx of slaves from from India to Indonesia shortly after 1680, amongst whom were probably a large number of cabinet-makers. Additionally, both the transport of gravestones with similar floral borders, which were used as ballast as ballast on V.O.C. ships, and samples of Indian textiles also contributed to the spread of this new decoration. (J. Veenendaal, Furniture from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India, Delft, 1985, pp. 47-55). Ebony and ebonised chairs of this type mentioned above were already being imported into the Netherlands and England during the second half of the 17th Century. Dutch colonial chairs were considered entirely appropriate for the decoration of Romantic antiquarian interiors in England and to a lesser extant in the Netherlands during the second half of the 18th Century and most of the 19th Century as they were thought to be Tudor. This tradition was compounded by Horace Walpole at the time he was furnishing his Gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill in Middlesex. having seen a pair of ebony chairs in Esher Place, Surrey, where Cardinal Wolsey had lived from 1519, he immediately, but wrong, associated them with Wolsey, compounding a tradition which survived for many years. (C. Wainwright, 'Only the True Black Blood', Furniture History', XXI (1985), pp 250-254)

See illustration