The Roxburghe Armchairs

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The Roxburghe Armchairs

About the Item

The golden-framed armchairs are designed in the George I ‘antique’ fashion promoted by Richard Boyle,3rd Earl of Burlington through his protégé the Rome-trained court architect William Kent (d.1748), whose work was later popularised by John Vardy’s, ‘Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent’, 1744. This fashion was also introduced by the Rome-trained architect James Gibbs (d.1754), author of, ‘A Book of Architecture’, 1728. Celebrating the Art of lyric poetry, their triumphal-arched backs are labelled by golden-flowered tablets of Venus’ sacred roses in bronze relief (now missing). According to Ovid’s, Metamorphoses (Loves of the Gods), the water-born Nature deity’s triumphal shell-carriage was dolphin powered, so in Venus’s name the seats’ hollowed and wave-scrolled arm-pillars are scale-imbricated. Likewise the arms’ Ionic waved-volutes are wrapped by Roman acanthus and issue ribboned festoons of husks and pearled libation-paterae in celebration of the water Element. Golden ‘bronze’ pearl-strings would have framed their damask upholstery, which, no doubt, was acanthus-figured. These pearls are likely to have tied rose-flowered corner tablets in a ‘Vitruvian’ waved ribbon-guilloche, like the related chairs that lined the Kentdesigned Withdrawing Room of Rousham, Oxfordshire. The chair-legs’ husk-festooned pilasters are herm-tapered or thermed to evoke the boundary-posts of Virgil’s, ‘Georgics’, celebrating a paradisical Golden Age through the triumph of the Science of Agriculture. Their reed-banded plinths are ‘altar’ hollowed, like the capitals, which are antique-fluted and wreathed in acanthus flowers. An armchair of this pattern became the Mayor’s Chair at Lewes Assizes; while another, belonging to the Oddfellows Friendly Society, Sussex was on the art-market in 1977. The ‘bronze’ roses and pearled nailing can be judged from a sketch made by the architect Sir William Chambers (d.1796) of chairs at Tottenham House, Wiltshire, which had been designed in the early 1720s by Lord Burlington’s architectural protege Henry Flitcroft (d.1769) for Charles Bruce, Lord Bruce (d.1747) (They are now in the Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia)

Dimensions:
Height: 37.8 in (96 cm)Depth: 25.2 in (64 cm)Seat Height: 16.93 in (43 cm)
Sold As:
Set of 4
Style:
George I (In the Style Of)
Materials and Techniques:
Giltwood
Place of Origin:
United Kingdom
Period:
18th Century and Earlier
Date of Manufacture:
18th Century
Condition:
Seller Location:
London, GB
Reference Number:
Seller: TBC20001stDibs: 1306218481383