LATE 19TH EARLY 20TH CENTURY

These Chinese-railed chairs have diamond-lozenged backs corresponding to a 'garden seat' pattern illustrated in the architect Charles Over's Ornamental Architecture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste, 1758 (pl. 9); while their cluster-columned legs can be related to Chinese 'bamboo' furniture, such as the garden chair pattern in William Chambers' Designs of Chinese Buildings, 1757. A suite of chairs of this pattern may have been introduced to Lennoxlove, Haddington in the 18th Century by Lord Blantyre. In 1914, at the time that the furniture historian Percy Macquoid was involved in the redecoration of the house for Major William Baird, one of these chairs featured in Country Life (11 April 1914, pp. 552-528), where it was noted as being after 'a local design of chair known as the 'cockpen' chair'. In the 18th Century, the pattern may have been that referred to as 'diamond back' in an invoice for 15 'Mahogany chairs diamond backs' sent in 1761 to William, 5th Earl of Dumfries by the Edinburgh wright Alexander Peter (S. Pryke, 'Cockpen Quest', Country Life, 29 April 1993, pp. 80-81).