Pair of Ebony Side Chairs
Indian, Late-17th century
Pair of ebony side chairs, the curved pierced top-rail carved with apsaras, the uprights with birds, the backs of twisted spindles spaced by turned finials, carving echoing the cresting beneath, and also repeated under the seat frame, with caned ebony drop-in seats, on a ‘barley sugar’ turned under-frame, the uprights, seat frame and blocks at the top and bottom of the legs all carved with formal and running leafage in low relief. South Indian or Ceylonese, late-17th Century.
Height of back 38½" (98cm).
These chairs are from a set of six, two of which are now in the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.(1) A group of seven almost identical chairs, together with five armchairs, is in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, having previously been at Longleat House, Wiltshire, for where they are thought to have been acquired at the beginning of the 18th Century.(2)
Horace Walpole owned a number of examples of this type of chair at Strawberry Hill, some of which can be seen in a picture by John Carter of 1788,(3) and which feature in the celebrated sale of the contents of Strawberry Hill in 1842. On May 12th, 1842 (the 16th day of the sale), lot 13 was ‘TWO SPLENDID SOLID EBONY CHAIRS, the tops and frames richly carved in open scroll work, with Figures and Birds at the corners, cane seats, on twisted legs and frames, perfectly unique’, with the next three lots described as ‘ditto, en suite’, and lot 17 as ‘A SINGLE SOLID EBONY CHAIR, WITH ARMS, equally beautiful, the seat stuffed and covered with crimson satin damask’. Lot 54 of the following day’s sale was ‘A pair of beautiful old CARVED SOLID EBONY CHAIRS, of the Elizabethan period, pierced backs, richly decorated with Birds, Flowers and Figures, twisted rails, the frames finely carved in scrolls, and cane seats’, the following two lots being ‘A PAIR OF DITTO, to correspond’, and ‘Ditto’, and lot 79, ‘TWO SPLENDID SOLID EBONY CHAIRS, richly carved in open scroll work, the borders beautifully raised in carvings of alto relievo, on handsome twisted legs and stretchers, with cane seats, in the finest state of preservation’, with the two following lots, ‘Two chairs, in every respect to correspond’, and ‘Three ditto, en suite’.
Walpole had bought these chairs at auction in 1763, from a sale at Staughton House, Huntingdonshire, and he refers to his attendance at this sale in a letter from Huntingdon of 30th May, 1763, to his friend George Montagu :- ‘I believe I am the first man that ever went sixty miles to an auction. As I came for ebony, I have been up to my chin in ebony; there is literally nothing but ebony in the house; all the other goods, if there were any, and I trust my Lady Conyers did not sleep upon ebony mattresses, are taken away. There are two tables and eighteen chairs, all made by the Hallett of two hundred years ago. These I intend to have; for mind, the auction does not begin until Thursday. There are more plebian chairs of the same materials, but I have left commissions for only the true black blood’.(4) There is recorded in the Strawberry Hill Account Book of December, 1763 that these eighteen ebony chairs and two tables were bought, at the cost of £45.(5) Interestingly, Walpole had remarked on the chairs from Longleat referred to above, when visiting the house in July, 1762,(6) and this visit may well have encouraged his purchases of the following year. The reference to ‘the Hallett of two hundred years ago’ is because Walpole, along with his contemporaries, believed these chairs to have been made in England in the 16th century, having seen similar ebony chairs at Esher Place, Surrey, a house which had been lived in by Cardinal Wolsey, and the belief that this type of furniture was Tudor prevailed throughout most of the 19th Century. Six ebony chairs at Windsor Castle, presented by the Duke of York to George IV in 1824, were described as having been the ‘Property of Cardinal Wolsey’, and an illustration by Pugin for an essay on ancient furniture appropriate to the poems of Sir Walter Scott shows a chair very similar to these present examples underneath a framed portrait of Henry VIII.(7)
A Pair of ebony chairs of this type at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, are traditionally said to have come to England from Portugal in 1662, as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry.[8] Other examples of ebony furniture were at William Beckford’s Fonthill, six chairs of which were bought by the dealer John Swaby in the sale of 1823, probably the same six which were presented by the Duke of York to George IV in 1824 for Windsor Castle, where they remain. Cothele House, Cornwall, is another house which has ebony furniture known to have been there since the 18th Century because of an embroidered inscription on the maroon velvet cushions of an ebony settee, recording the visit to the house of George III and Queen Charlotte in 1789 and the fact that they sat on the settee whilst breakfasting. The Victoria & Albert Museum has a chair of this type (ref. 413-1882), bought from the Hamilton Palace sale and previously also owned by Beckford.
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Footnotes
1. Sold by Harris Lindsay to the museum in 1999. See Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, 2001, no. 1, pp. 135-137.
2. See The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, Vol. 21, 1993, p. 143.
3. See Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, 1989, fig. 72, p. 94.
4. See Clive Wainwright, op. cit., pp. 90 and 92, and ‘Only the True Black Blood’, Furniture History, 1985, pp. 250-255.
5. Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior, 1989, p. 92.
6. P. Toynbee, ‘Horace Walpole’s Journals of Visits to Country Seats’, Walpole Society, xvi, 1927-28.
7. See Clive Wainwright, Furniture History, 1985, fig. 4, p. 257.
8. See Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 1992, Vol. II, p. 225.