A GEORGE III MAHOGANY OPEN ARMCHAIR

This armchair, with elegantly rounded back, serpentine seat and panelled term front legs headed by blocks and terminating in spade feet, can be attributed to the St. Martin's Lane workshops of Thomas Chippendale, based on its idiosyncratic constructional features and similarities to a suite of furniture supplied by Chippendale and his son, Thomas Chippendale Junior, to Ninian Home (1732-95) for the dining room at Paxton House, Berwickshire, circa 1774-6. The leg pattern of this chair in particular features on the cellaret, sideboard, three window seats and a set of four bergeres supplied for that room and still at Paxton (C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, vol. II, pp. 79, 99, 193 & 215, pls. 124, 162, 351 & 391). Whilst no bill for the dining room furniture survives, in a letter to Haig and Chippendale (Junior) dated 20 June 1789, Ninian Home wrote: 'I must observe with respect to the window curtains that your estimate is condiserably higher than I paid for those in the dining-room...They were furnished in January 1776.' The fact that Home's plantations in the West Indies kept him away from Paxton for extended periods of time as well as his accounts and correspondence suggest that he furnished Paxton one room at a time - and strongly infer a date for the dining room furniture of 1775-6. Chippendale's authorship can also be substantiated by comparison with the elaborate sideboard suite he supplied for the dining room at Harewood in circa 1770, although the Paxton mahogany furniture was far simpler and more modest than the ormolu-mounted rosewood and satinwood of the Harewood suite - and was made in a manner that Home himself described as 'neat and substantially good'.