INDONESIA, PROBABLY BATAVIA, LATE 17TH/EARLY 18TH CENTURY

Ebony and ebonised chairs of this type 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 for the decoration of Romantic antiquarian interiors in England and to a lesser extant in Holland 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. 'Only the True Black Blood', Furniture History XXI (1985), pp. 250-254)

See illustration