EARLY 19TH CENTURY, PROBABLY BY MILES AND EDWARDS

By an apparent coincidence, the design of these chairs was published by the draughtsman cabinet-maker Thomas Malton (d. 1801) in his Complete Treatise on Perspective, 1775, pl. XXXIV, fig. 131 (L. White, Pictorial Dictionary of British 18th Century Furniture Design, Woodbridge, 1990, p. 85). Little is known of the designer Thomas Malton but the similarity of his name to that of the Marquesses of Rockingham, both of whom were styled Thomas, Earl of Malton at a certain time of their lives, is striking. The memoirs of William Hickey, a former pupil of Malton's recorded in 1772: 'Mr. Malton had been for several years a cabinet maker, having a large shop in the Strand, but as nature blessed him with an extraordinary mechanical genius he was constantly engaged upon different subjects therein' and eventually gave up cabinet-making in favour of publishing pattern books (C. Gilbert and G. Beard, eds., The Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, Leeds, 1986, pp. 571-2).
There was a very large set of these chairs at Wentworth Woodhouse which is visible in early Country Life photographs and it seems certain that the set of 1775-80 was extended as more were required. The firm of Miles and Edwards was one of the leading cabinet-making firms in London in the 1820s and 1830s and they would have been a very suitable choice for Lord Fitzwilliam when he wanted to extend a set of chairs from the previous generation that was not numerous enough for the entertaining being undertaken by the 1820s (Beard and Gilbert, op. cit., p. 606).