拍品專文
For a Ming prototype of this design, see the folding armchair, originally in the Frederick Mueller Collection and in the Museum of Classic Furniture, Renaissance, California, illustrated by R.H. Ellsworth, Chinese Furniture, 1970, colour pl.26 and by Wang Shixiang, Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture, 1990, vol.II, no.A92, and sold in our New York Rooms, 29 November 1990, lot 395. As in the present lot, this chair has a pierced back splat and plain brass mounts. There is, however, a further group of Ming folding armchairs, with unpierced carved back splats and hammered silver mounts, of which only four are recorded. One of these, reputedly used by the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) during an annual festival at the Taiping temple, Beijing, originally in the Collections of George Crofts, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, The Museum of Classical Chinese Furniture, San Francisco, was sold in our New York Rooms, 19 September, 1996, lot 50. Another of this latter group is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, a third is in the Chen Mengjia Collection, Beijing, and the fourth is in the Palace Museum, Beijing