A chair from the original set, now at Temple Newsam, Yorkshire.
A GEORGE I PARCEL GILT WALNUT CHAIR WITH VERRE EGLOMISE INSERT BY THOMAS HOW, English, circa 1725
Height of seat: 19 in; 48 cm
Width: 22½ in; 57 cm
Depth: 23¼ in; 59 cm
Further images
Note: The original verre églomisé glass panel in the back is cracked. The chair retains virtually all the original gilt lead mounts.
This chair was once part of a suite of twelve chairs, two settees and two pedestals, all with the Scarsdale family crest painted on glass inserts. When they were exhibited by the furniture dealers White, Allom & Co. at the Exposition Universelle in Brussels in 1910, part of the suite was destroyed by fire. Copies were produced to complete the suite, and it was sold to an American collection in New York, where it was again damaged by fire in August 1921.
Eight chairs from the original set of twelve survived both fires. Today seven of them are in major collections: one pair in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (incised X and I), another pair in the Frick Collection in New York (VIII and XII), a single chair in the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Brooklyn (IV), and a third pair at Temple Newsam, Yorkshire (VII and IX).
This is the eighth and last chair (incised V) from the original set.
Provenance
Nicholas Leke, 4th Earl of Scarsdale, for Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire, England;
White, Allom & Co., London, England;
Mrs. Annie C. Kane, New York, USA, until 1921;
French & Co., New York, USA (before 1960);
Collection of Forrest Knowles, USA;
Hyde Park Antiques Ltd., New York, USA;
Private collection, USA.
Literature
Yvonne Hackenbroch, English Furniture with Some Furniture of Other Countries in the Irwin Untermyer Collection, 1958, pls. 64 & 65, figs 87 & 88, pp. 21-2 (formerly in the collection of John Inness Kane, New York, and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
F. Lewis Hinckley, A Directory of Queen Anne, Early Georgian and Chippendale Furniture, 1971, p. 63, ill. 64.
William Rieder, ‘Eighteenth-century chairs in the Untermyer Collection’, Apollo, March 1978, pp. 181-5.
Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert, The Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660-1840, 1986.
Geoffrey Beard and Judith Goodison, English Furniture 1500-1840, 1987, p. 47.
Christopher Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall, 1998, vol. III, pl. 6 and no. 696, p. 581.
Adam Bowett, Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740, 2009, p. 177, pl. 4:66 (now at Temple Newsam, Yorkshire).
