CIRCA 1820, POSSIBLY BY JAMES NEWTON, THE DESIGN ATTRIBUTED TO EDWARD WYATT

The chair has its triumphal arched back fretted in the manner of medieval window tracery as introduced in the mid-18th Century by the author Horace Walpole; but is conceived in the more robust gothic fashion promoted in the early 19th Century at Windsor Castle by James Wyatt (d.1813) as Surveyor General of King George III's Office of Works. With its herm-tapering and cluster-columned pillars, it relates to a Windsor Castle chair now in the Victoria & Albert Museum (see F. Collard, Regency Furniture, London, 1985, p. 165). It also relates to oak parlour chairs supplied for Taymouth Castle, Scotland, which were invoiced in 1810 by the Wardour Street upholsterers Messrs Newton and Son, but may have been designed by James Wyatt's cousin Edward Wyatt (d. 1833) of Oxford Street.
The present chair, like another in Lowewood Museum, Hertfordshire, is from a set of twelve that were formerly in the possession of the bell-founder John Warner (d.1845) of Lowewood and Woodlands, Hertfordshire.