19TH CENTURY

These 'Grecian' fashioned chairs, japanned in antique or black bronze delicately 'assisted with gold ornaments', reflect the French/antique fashion promoted by George Smith. Their pattern, with 'Apollo' lyre-scrolled backs raised on triumphal-arched trestles, is likely to have been invented by the cabinet-maker Joseph Sanders (d. 1818) around 1809, since it relates to one of his window-seat patterns that derived from Smith's work and was published that year by Rudolph Ackermann's, Repository of Arts. However, Sanders' prototype for these chairs, featuring laurel-festoons and an 'Apollo' sunburst medallion, was not published in the 1814 Repository when it featured alongside a desk, with lyre-scrolled trestles and a French 'cartonnier' nest-of-drawers, of a type popularly known as a 'Carlton House Table'. Ackermann's publication has since called this chair form also to be titled as a 'Carlton House' pattern. The present chairs relate closely to one recorded in the 1940s in the collection of Sir Roderick Jones (see M. Jourdain, Regency Furniture, rev. ed. 1948 p.87, fig. 52).
A closely related pair of chairs, formerly in the collection of Mrs Charles B. Wrightsman, was sold from the property of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sothebys, New York, 11-12 April 1997, lot 776.