OF GEORGE II STYLE, ATTRIBUTED TO SIDNEY LETTS, CIRCA 1910

This chair is copied from the architect Sir John Soane's 'Chippendale chair', displayed at his museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and it forms part of a suite of related seat-furniture discussed by Eben Howard Gay in his Chippendale Romance, New York, 1915 (R.W. Symonds, 'Furniture in the Soane Museum', Country Life, 27 January 1950, pp. 220-1). Its serpentine frame is embellished with arabesque satyr masks emerging from bacchic lion feet and with garland-bearing eagles' heads in the 'antique' manner promoted by William Kent, Master Carpenter to King George II. The voluted cartouche splat derives from engravings by Johann Lauch (fl. 1724-57), such as were plagiarised in Thomas and Batty Langley, The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1740.
A very closely related chair from the collection of H. J. Joel, Esq., The Stud House, Childwick Bury, Hertfordshire was sold Christie's, London, 1 April 1993, lot 171, and again Christie's, London, 26 January 2011, lot 240 (£8,750).