FP 198
A carved white painted and gilded beech upholstered shield-back armchair
George III, circa 1780
All four legs tipped
The Collection is well represented with drawing room chairs in this neoclassical taste that was introduced to Britain by the architect Robert Adam on his return from Italy in 1758. The style came to dominate architecture and interior design during the second half of the 18th century, during which time there was a great increase in the amount of building of new houses both in the country and in towns and cities, particularly for the newly rich professionals such as bankers, lawyers and doctors, and a consequent growth in demand for furnishings. This example is a particularly elegantly shaped one with a three-dimensionally curved back and out-swept arms. It would have been made as part of a suite of several armchairs and a settee or two, for the grandest entertaining room of a substantial house. The firm of Gillows recommended in a letter of 1789 that dining chairs should be made of mahogany, the dining room traditionally having a more masculine feel to it, but chairs intended for the saloon or drawing room might be painted, unless they were to be moved from one room to the other. The white and gold decoration (part of which is original), would have matched that of the room, and the upholstery (which is modern), would probably have been covered initially with an expensive silk, as befitted the quality of the chair and its surroundings.
Beech, with its fine texture, toughness and durability, previously mainly used for seat rails and secondary work, became popular at this period as a wood of which whole chairs were made which were to be given a gilded or painted surface. It lends itself well to the complex shaping of the frame to which, in this case, some of the decorative motifs are applied in composition and some carved out of the wood. The motifs used, such as the knotted ribbon bow cresting, chains of husks, leaf-tips and acanthus foliage, are all common neo-classical ones, as is the shield shape of the back. Oval paterae are now missing from the tops of the legs.
Hepplewhite's The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Guide of 1788, which exemplifies the spirit of Robert Adam's neo-classicism on a more domestic scale, calls such stuffed back armchairs 'cabriole chairs', the term apparently coming from the chair-like seat of the two-wheeled cabriolet carriage that was popular at this period.