George Edmund Street was one of the most eminent architects of his day and one of the greatest exponents of the Gothic Revival. He was an assistant in the office of Sir George Gilbert Scott 1844-9 before setting up in independent practice, and in turn was the master of Norman Shaw, William Morris and Philip Webb. Though so much of his work was ecclesiastical, he is probably best known for his Law Courts in the Strand, commissioned in 1868 and still incomplete at his death in 1881. In the last year of his life he was elected both Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy and President of the RIBA. He was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Charles Barry and Gilbert Scott. This set of chairs was designed for his own use and has remained in his family to this day. As his son A. E. Street emphasised in his Memoir of his father (1888), Street believed passionately that an architect should not restrict his activity to the shell of a building but on the contrary should design every fitting or piece of furniture in it. 'Such was invariably his own practice, and much of his most imaginative and beautiful work is to be found among his designs for embroideries, for plate, for metal, for marble and woodwork of every kind.' Given this concern, which of course he shared with Pugin, Burges, Godwin, Webb and other Victorian architects, it is surprising that so little of his furniture seems to have survived. These chairs are characteristic of the few pieces that are known in their simplicity of design and understated decoration.