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Lot Essay
These comfortable Drawing Room 'easy chairs', richly sculpted and elegantly serpentined in the 'French' manner, reflect the George II fashion called 'Modern' in Thomas Chippendale's, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, 1754.
Their leg pattern, of Roman 'truss' form enriched with Roman acanthus and antique flutes, was adopted for chairs supplied in the 1750s by the celebrated cabinet-makers and tapissiers, Paul Saunders and George Smith Bradshaw (d. 1812), including 'Elbow' chairs supplied in 1757 for Holkham Hall, Norfolk (A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, 1968, fig. 378). Related legs feature on a suite of Beauvais tapestry-covered chairs commissioned by Peregrine Bertie, 3rd Duke of Ancaster (d. 1788) and on a pair of chairs from the collection of the Earls of Ancaster, Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, sold in these Rooms, 11 May 1934, lot 168. Another four in the New York collection of Judge Irwin Untermeyer, are illustrated in Coledridge, ibid., fig. 182.
Their leg pattern, of Roman 'truss' form enriched with Roman acanthus and antique flutes, was adopted for chairs supplied in the 1750s by the celebrated cabinet-makers and tapissiers, Paul Saunders and George Smith Bradshaw (d. 1812), including 'Elbow' chairs supplied in 1757 for Holkham Hall, Norfolk (A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, London, 1968, fig. 378). Related legs feature on a suite of Beauvais tapestry-covered chairs commissioned by Peregrine Bertie, 3rd Duke of Ancaster (d. 1788) and on a pair of chairs from the collection of the Earls of Ancaster, Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, sold in these Rooms, 11 May 1934, lot 168. Another four in the New York collection of Judge Irwin Untermeyer, are illustrated in Coledridge, ibid., fig. 182.