拍品專文
This settee or 'love seat', with its distinctive foliate-headed channelled cabriole legs and truss feet, is of identical form to the celebrated suite of seat-furniture supplied to Sir Robert Walpole, later 1st Earl of Orford (d. 1745) for Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Comprising 'Eight Chairs' in the 'Cov'd or Wrought Bedchamber' and 'Fiveteen Chairs Two settees' in the 'Cabinett', the Houghton chairs were most probably supplied by the Roberts family of 'The Royal Chair', Marylebone Street, to whom Sir Robert owed the enormous sum of £1420 8 7½d 'les £200 by cost' in 1729.
Unlike further suites of seat-furniture at Houghton, no 'love seat' amongst the walnut and parcel-gilt suites is recorded in either the 1745 or 1792 inventories. However, on the basis of these closely related chairs with Italian cut velvet that was supplied to Sir William Humphreys, Lord Mayor of London circa 1714-15, the Houghton suite may well have been supplied for the earlier house at Houghton, which was razed to the ground in 1722. While all twenty-two side chairs, two settees and one easy chair from the 1745 Houghton inventory are all accounted for, it is possible, if unlikely that the suite was initially larger when placed in the earlier house. This may well account for the further set of six unprovenanced side chairs sold anonymously at Sotheby's London, 29 January 1960, lot 117, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (W.15-1916), Temple Newsam, Leeds, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Melbourne Art Gallery, Austrailia. However, it is more likely to have belonged to a similar suite such as that supplied to Sir John Chester for Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire (illustrated in situ J. Lees-Milne, English Country Houses, Baroque 1685-1715, London, 1968, pl. 369).
Unlike further suites of seat-furniture at Houghton, no 'love seat' amongst the walnut and parcel-gilt suites is recorded in either the 1745 or 1792 inventories. However, on the basis of these closely related chairs with Italian cut velvet that was supplied to Sir William Humphreys, Lord Mayor of London circa 1714-15, the Houghton suite may well have been supplied for the earlier house at Houghton, which was razed to the ground in 1722. While all twenty-two side chairs, two settees and one easy chair from the 1745 Houghton inventory are all accounted for, it is possible, if unlikely that the suite was initially larger when placed in the earlier house. This may well account for the further set of six unprovenanced side chairs sold anonymously at Sotheby's London, 29 January 1960, lot 117, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (W.15-1916), Temple Newsam, Leeds, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Melbourne Art Gallery, Austrailia. However, it is more likely to have belonged to a similar suite such as that supplied to Sir John Chester for Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire (illustrated in situ J. Lees-Milne, English Country Houses, Baroque 1685-1715, London, 1968, pl. 369).