THIRD QUARTER 18TH CENTURY, POSSIBLY IRISH

The dining chair has its 'vase' splat enriched with festive bacchic ribbons looped in the 'Chippendale' manner; and the splat, with its fretted lozenged compartment revealed beneath a tassled veil lambrequin, derives from Matthias Darly's patterns for 'Parlour Chairs' issued around 1750 in his Second Book of Chairs, (pl.1). An armchair of the same pattern formed part of the collection assembled around 1900 by Mr. A.R. Stilwell Freeland under the advice of the furniture historian Herbert Cescinsky, who illustrated it in his English Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, 1909 (p.184, fig. 182). Another chair of this pattern, together with related English and American chairs with this pattern of splat, also feature in John J. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830, New York, 1982, pp. 277 and 178).
Another related example was sold anonymously, Christie's, New York, 18 October 2001, lot 80.