This elegantly fretted banqueting chair has a picturesque flower-vase back that is appropriate to the fashionable mid-18th Century Gothic 'Chinese' garden pavilions. It reflects the Anglo-Chinese style immediately prior to the appearance of the more authentic Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses etc, 1757, issued by Sir William Chambers (d. 1796), architect of Princess Augusta's pagoda-templed gardens at Kew. The vase's rustic 'paling' or 'railing' displays a cross-shaped compartment that corresponds to 'Gothic fret' patterns published in Paul Decker's, Gothic Architecture Decorated, 1759 and Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754 (pl. CLV). It epitomises the cabinet-maker's whimsical combination of antique, Chinese and old-English Gothic, since its hermed legs are chamfered and cusped in the fashion adopted for exotic East India Company imports and illustrated in patterns for vase-decked tables in Messrs Edwards and Darly's New Book of Chinese Designs, 1754 (see E. White, Pictorial Dictionary of British 18th Century Furniture Design, Woodbridge, 1990, p. 296). Related features appear on a set of beribboned and hollow-seated chairs supplied for Uppark, Sussex, and which can probably be identified with a 1758 invoice for £70.10.7. for 'Gothic' chairs from William Miller (d.1767), a subscriber to Chippendale's Director, (see A. Coleridge, 'Georgian Cabinet-Makers at Uppark, Sussex', Connoisseur, November, 1967 p. 160, fig. 9.)