CIRCA 1775, LEGS POSSIBLY ASSOCIATED

This unusual settee, with its Nemean lion-pelt of Hercules displayed as nailed drapery across its back, relates to group of seat furniture discussed by Lucy Wood in The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 2004, vol. II, no. 57. A suite thought to have comprised at least ten armchairs from the Cope family seat at Bramshill Park, Hampshire, includes three acquired by Lord Leverhulme in 1905 (now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery) and a further six sold by Sir Anthony Cope, Bt., at Sotheby’s in 1956 (later in the Astor collection at Cliveden; two are now at Berrington Hall, Herefordshire). Two pairs of armchairs, probably from the 1956 Sotheby’s group, were more recently sold in The Collection of Ann & Gordon Getty: Wheatland, Christie’s, New York, 19 October 2023, lot 59, and Christie’s, London, 29 October 2025, lot 14. Another armchair, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (36.19), gifted by Archer M. Huntington in 1936 and bearing a Jacques Seligman trade label, is also believed to originate from the Bramshill suite, though it incorporates replaced legs (ibid., fig. 389). These replacement legs, likely taken from a French chair, correspond to those on the Aitken settee.

Within this broader group, six sofas are recorded. Of particular relevance is a pair handled by Mallett at Bourdon House in 1993, which must share provenance with the Aitken settee: their back rails bear the inscriptions 'York 7672A' and 'York 7673,' markings that closely correspond to the '7672 York B' found on the present piece, all evidently twentieth-century inscriptions. The Mallett settees came from an undisclosed source in Northumberland. Their differing seat rails preclude their having been executed en suite with the Aitken settee, and their tapering legs feature arched husk-carved panels above square blocks and ball feet. Another sofa from the group, with square tapered legs, is in a private collection in Los Angeles, while a further example was supplied to Mapledurham House, Oxfordshire. A giltwood sofa with lion-pelt cresting and a hero’s mask on the seat rail, distinguished by its curved ends and scrolled cabriole legs in the form of hairy lion paws, was sold at Christie’s, London, 27 November 2003, lot 59; another, presumably en suite but reduced in length, was sold at Christie’s, London, 12 April 2018, lot 262. The Aitken settee is the only example in the group that does not feature a hero’s mask to the seat rail.

The present settee once formed part of the collection of Seton Porter, a prosperous executive associated with National Distillers and 20th Century Fox, and his wife, Marie. From 1928 to 1939 the Porters resided in the celebrated maisonette apartment at 666 Park Avenue. In 1928, architects William R. Pearsall, J. Laying Mills and F. Burrall Hoffman Jr. were commissioned to remodel and decorate the apartment, and at least four rooms were fitted with imported paneling, including a pine room from Spettisbury Manor. The interiors were published in International Studio Magazine (1931) and in Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan (A. Alpern, New York, 1992, pp. 124-126), although the settee is not visible in any of the surviving photographs. The Porters’ whereabouts between 1939 and 1948, when the settee was sold at auction, are unknown.

The settee was subsequently owned by the Gilded Age socialite Madame Jacques Balsan, née Consuelo Vanderbilt, daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Smith Belmont. She entered into an ill-fated marriage with Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, in 1895 and lived at Blenheim Palace until their separation in 1905; the divorce was finalized in 1921. Soon afterwards she married the French aviator Jacques Balsan, dividing their time between the 17th century Château de Saint-Georges-Motel in Normandy and the Hôtel Marlborough in Paris, the latter illustrated in 1936 in a privately published two-volume work, Collection de Madame et du Colonel Balsan. The Balsans settled permanently in Paris in 1940, where they remained for the rest of their lives.