CIRCA 1800

Details

A PAIR OF SWEDISH GILTWOOD AND GILT-COMPOSITION OPEN ARMCHAIRS
Circa 1800
Each with a backscrolled padded back and seat covered in red striped foliate material, the part-padded arms with conforming material, their supports scrolling into eagle heads, above a laurel-wrapped apron, on foliage-clasped turned tapering legs, with back legs downswept and with paw feet, regilt, one back leg with a restored break (2)

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Lot Essay

These Grecian-scrolled chairs, evoking music and poetry's triumph, have palm-flowered and laurel-wreathed frames guarded by the chimerical eagle/lion 'griffin'. The griffin, sacred to Apollo, served as the badge of Prince Carl, later Carl XIV Johan of Sweden (d.1818), and was introduced on the furniture designed for him for Rosersberg around 1800 under the direction of the Rome-trained architect Gustaf af Sillen. In particular the chair pattern corresponds to that of a set of chairs, now at the Royal Palace, Stockholm, which were supplied in 1803 by the celebrated Stockholm chair-maker Ephraim Stahl, but displaying entire 'Roman' bronzed griffin perched above their legs (H. Groth, Neoclassicism in the North, London, 1990, cat. no. 13). This pattern of orb-capped columnar leg also appears on other seat-furniture at Rosersberg (ibid., figs. 135 and 138). The pattern originally derived from an engraving of a sphynx-guarded seat in C. Percier and P. Fontaine's, Recueil de décorations interieures, 1801.

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