Lot Essay
The chairs festive Apollonian lyre and bacchic ribbon-scrolled backs are ornamented in celebration of Venus water-birth, appropriate to the George II Roman fashioned Eating Parlours of the 1730s. Roman foliage festoons the scalloped and scale-imbricated cartouches of the nature deitys dolphin-drawn shell carriages that label the triumphal arched crestings, and issue from the antique-fluted India vase splats bearing her shell badge displayed on hollowed altar-plinths. The Feasts of Venus, shared with Bacchus, are recalled by the bacchic lion paws that issue from veil-draped acanthus embellishing their trussed columnar legs. This back pattern appears to have been invented for chairs commissioned for Hinton House, Somerset, and now attributed to the Clerkenwell cabinet-maker Giles Grendey (d. 1780). Six of the latter side chairs sold anonymously, Sotheby's, London, 1 November 1968, lot 58 are related to a set of 'Chippendale' chairs, that were almost certainly in the possession of D.L. Isaacs in 1912 (L. Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 2008, vol. I, no. 21).