These drawing-room chairs, with their hollowed arm-rests rising from the front legs and festooned with Roman acanthus foliage issuing from flowered volutes, relate to a 'French Chair' pattern in Thomas Chippendale's, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director, London, 3rd ed., 1762 (pl. XIX). They are likely to have been commissioned around 1760 for Corby Castle, Cumbria by Philip Howard (d. 1810), and introduced at the same time as the drawing-room chimneypiece, which was designed in the French picturesque manner with flower-festoons and acanthus foliage. Three of the drawing-room chairs from the same suite were illustrated in situ in the drawing-room in the catalogue of the Corby Castle house sale, when they were sold by Sir John Howard-Lawson, Bt. and Lady Howard-Lawson, Corby Castle, Cumbria, Phillips Scotland house sale, 18 May 1994, lots 346-349 (p. 47). Their basic pattern also relates to the celebrated St. Giles's House chairs commissioned by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 4th Earl of Shaftesbury (d. 1771) (P. Macquoid and R. Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, London, rev. ed., 1954, vol. III, p. 94, fig. 54).