These chairs were almost certainly commissioned for the Barlour (later the Saloon) at Sudbury Hall by George Venables Vernon, 1st Baron Vernon of Kinderton (d.1780) as part of the aggrandisement of the house carried out following his marriage to Mary Howard in 1733. A Jacobean house with Grinling Gibbons carving and ceilings by Laguerre, the panelling in the Saloon was probably altered in the 1740's to accomodate full-length portraits dated bewteen 1736 and 1741. A pair of giltwood chandeliers from this period hang in the room, and John Cornforth surmises in his 'Sudbury Hall Revisited', Country Life, 10 June 1971, pp.1428-1433, that Lord Vernon would have likely commissioned a set of chairs at this time. One of the chairs appears in a 1905 photograph of the Long Gallery, however, many of the contents of the house were sold during the next two decades before Lord Vernon and the Dowager Lady Vernon went to live there in 1922. The house was transferred to the care of the National Trust upon the death of the 9th Baron in 1963.

This set appears to be part of a larger suite. A matching armchair with padded back and eagle-headed scrolled arms is illustrated in F. L. Hinckley, Queen Anne and Georgian Looking Glasses, 1987, p.132, pl.106. A matching sette was exhibited in the Loan Exhibition of English Decorative Art at Lansdowne House, 1929, lent by Mr. Charles E. Russell, and illustrated in the catalogue, no. 350, color pl.LXX. These chairs, with their fretted ribbon splats festooned by husks issuing from Roman foliage, and with Vitruvian seat-rail, are closely related to a side chair which formed part of the furnishings at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, commissioned by 1st Earl of Leicester (d.1760), a leading patron of the architect/furniture designer William Kent (d.1748) (see F. Lenygon, Furniture in England, 1914, fig.74).