BY WILLIAM VILE AND JOHN COBB, CIRCA 1753

The celebrated partnership of William Vile and John Cobb first appears in the London Directory in 1750, at the centre of the London cabinet-making trade on St. Martin’s Lane, close neighbours of Thomas Chippendale’s workshop. This prime location is a reflection of their reputation and their impressive clientele, which grew with William Vile’s appointment as cabinet-maker to the Royal Household of the newly crowned King George and Queen Charlotte in January 1761, although the foundations had been laid with notable commissions for Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill and the Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall. Anthony Coleridge surmises that the firm ‘can probably be taken to be Chippendale’s most serious rivals’ (Chippendale Furniture: the work of Thomas Chippendale and his Contemporaries in the Rococo Style, London, 1968, p. 19). Much of their finest work was accomplished for the Royal household, including an impressive architectural mahogany bookcase supplied to Buckingham House in 1762.

The Vyne
One of the firms earliest recorded commissions was for Anthony Chute (1691-1754) at The Vyne, Basingstoke, Hampshire in 1753. The present pair of chairs were part a set of six described in an invoice dated 30 March 1753 as ‘6 neat mahogany chairs stuffed with linen at 19/- each’ and were subsequently sold by the Chute family in 1981. The other four remain at The Vyne in the care of the National Trust, comprising a pair with scrolled feet (NT718832 and NT718833), and a pair with pad feet (NT718834 and NT718835), all four retain their original case covers of sprigged linen. Two of the set of six are illustrated in the Print Room by Country Life in 1921.