TEN CIRCA 1820 AND REDECORATED; FOUR SECOND HALF 20TH CENTURY

This suite of Regency 'Grecian' or 'modern style' seat furniture with tablet crest rails, scrolled arms and sabre legs derives from chair designs by Thomas Hope (d. 1831) published in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, plates 4 and 24. They are a version of the klismos chair, the most prevalent chair design of the period, and reflect fashionable taste promoted around 1800 by George IV, as Prince of Wales. Appropriate for a room-of-entertainment, the pierced horizontal splat of each chair is embellished with a pair of lyres, a musical instrument associated to ancient Greece, flanking a central medallion of the deity, Apollo, whose attribute as the god of poetry, music and leader of the muses is the lyre. These chairs also relate to designs for klismos chairs with premiere and contre-partie metal inlay by George Bullock (c. 1777-1818), the pattern of which survives in the Bullock/Wilkinson Tracings, p. 5 (Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery).