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Lot Essay
This finely worked pair of ebony chairs is similar to one in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Amin Jaffer, Luxury Goods from India. The Art of the Indian Cabinet-Maker, London, 2002, no.16, pp.46-47). So close are they in the individual components of the design that it seems very possible that they were originally part of the same suite, or at least produced by the same workshop. Ebony furniture of this type seems first to have been produced along the Coromandel Coast. Contemporaneous accounts, such as that of the Dutch traveller Georg Rumphius (1627-1702) recorded that the coast ‘is exceptionally richly provided of this [ebony] as the natives make from it all kinds of curious work, as chairs, benches and small tables, carving them out with foliage and sculpture’ (quoted in Jaffer, op.cit., p.46).
Similar chairs have been recorded in English collections since as early as the mid-18th century – and were for a long time believed to be examples of early English furniture. This misconception seems to have been fuelled by Horace Walpole (1717-97) who collected such furniture for his Gothic Revival house, Strawberry Hill. A watercolour on paper by John Carter, dated to 1788, depicts similar furniture decorating the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill (in the Lewis Walpole Library in Yale University Library, published in Jaffer, op.cit., p.46).
Another similar chair is in the Asian civilisations Museum in Singapore (inv. 2011-00716-001).
Similar chairs have been recorded in English collections since as early as the mid-18th century – and were for a long time believed to be examples of early English furniture. This misconception seems to have been fuelled by Horace Walpole (1717-97) who collected such furniture for his Gothic Revival house, Strawberry Hill. A watercolour on paper by John Carter, dated to 1788, depicts similar furniture decorating the Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill (in the Lewis Walpole Library in Yale University Library, published in Jaffer, op.cit., p.46).
Another similar chair is in the Asian civilisations Museum in Singapore (inv. 2011-00716-001).