Lot Essay
The elegant Ionic-scrolled seats, reflecting the George III Grecian fashion popularised by James Stuart's, Antiquities of Athens, (1762), were originally designed en suite with banqueting hall settees, whose Grecian triumphal-arched backs were accompanied by reed-enriched bergere arms terminating in Ionic waved volutes. The seat friezes, likewise evoke the birth of Venus, with their Vitruvian frets of festive wave-scrolled ribbons; while pearled and quatrefoiled tablets of Roman foliage cap their hermed and reed-enriched pilasters. They were almost certainly designed for either William Stanhope, 2nd Earl of Harrington or his son Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington (d. 1829) of Harrington House, St. James's and Petersham Lodge, Richmond, who are listed amongst the patrons of the Berkeley Square cabinet-makers William and John Linnell (see H. Hayward and P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980. p.30). The prototype for the Harrington settee pattern can be traced to the Linnell's design of 1767 for some Venus shell-capped settees for Shardeloes, Buckinghamshire (see Hayward, ibid, fig 251).