The Petworth sgabelli chairs
possibly Francis Clein [also Cleyn] (Rostock 1582 – London 1658)
Category
Furniture
Date
circa 1620 - 1640
Materials
Carved oak and elm, painted and partly gilded
Measurements
103 x 33 x 40.5 cm
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Petworth House and Park, West Sussex
NT 485391
Caption
This stylish set of nine chairs is likely to have been purchased in 1636 by Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602–68) for his house in London. The elaborate and ornamental design (perhaps by Francis Clein, c.1582–1658) was directly influenced by Italian style, and similar chairs – known as sgabelli (stools) – were popular in Italy in the late 1500s. Although it would have been possible to perch on these chairs, perhaps while waiting in a hall, they were chiefly designed to impress and furnish a grand chamber or gallery. These examples were carefully looked after and remained in use at the family’s home at Petworth House in West Sussex for several centuries, and were documented as being on display in the Marble Hall in 1750.
Summary
A set of nine backstools or chairs, of sgabello type, of carved oak and elm, ebonised and parcel-gilt, possibly designed by Francis Clein (1582-1658) and made in England. According to inventory evidence, these chairs were originally parcel-gilt but painted black between 1750 and 1764. Each having a slightly raked cartouche-shaped back, topped by a cresting of a winged mask above mannerist foliate scrolls and painted with the Percy crescent beneath an Earl’s coronet. The back slotting into holes in the rear of the seat and fixed with wedges. The hexagonal seat with central circular dish and moulded edge carved with stiff leaves. Raised on a pair of shaped boards, joined by a shaped stretcher and on paw feet. The front board carved with a mask between foliated scrolls.
Full description
Italianate in decoration, form and construction, this pattern of chair and variants were the height of fashion with collectors at the early Stuart court, where the Classical architecture and designs introduced to England by the likes of Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and Balthazar Gerbier (1592-1663) were avidly cultivated. Carved with cartouches, foliated scrolls and winged masks, and made of boards fixed together with a pair of wedged mortise and tenon joints, they are an anomaly in English furniture, a version of the sgabello chair popular in Tuscany and the Veneto from c.1570. In 1762, Horace Walpole (1717-92) attributed the design of chairs of this type (with shell-carved backs) to the German-born Francis Clein (c.1582-1648) who was appointed chief designer at the Mortlake tapestry works in England in 1626. Painted with the Percy crescent beneath an Earl’s coronet, this set – and its companion set (NT 483453) – is associated with the 1636 purchase of ‘backstooles in the Italian fashion’ by Petworth’s owner Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602-1668) for his London palace, Northumberland House. Other arbiters of taste and elegance who owned such chairs included the 1st Earl of Holland for Holland House (now at Lacock NT 995887), the 1st Duke of Buckingham (both for York House and Chelsea) and the Earl and Countess of Arundel. A c.1618 portrait of the countess in the Gallery of Arundel House, London, by Daniel Mytens (c.1590-1647), shows two similar chairs, and yet more appear in the garden of Ham House in a painting (NT 1139878) of the later 1670s by Hendrick Dankerts (1625-80). Inventories record sgabello chairs alongside furniture and sculpture of stone, marble and plaster in ‘a consciously Italian language of interior decoration’ (Peck, p. 218). The Petworth chairs were probably originally a cool, neutral colour – or possibly wood-grained – highlighted with gilding to complement this type of scheme. In an inventory of 1750, they were described as 'carved and gilt wood [chairs] with halfe moons’ but by 1764 (when another inventory was taken) as 'Black & Gilt hall chairs', suggesting that they had been painted in the intervening period. First recorded at Petworth in 1680 in the ‘Lobby’, in 1750, despite being by then over one hundred years old, they were displayed in the Marble Hall, one of Petworth’s principal rooms, a testament to Britain’s enduring fascination with Italian style.
Provenance
First recorded at Petworth in 1680. Thence by descent, until the death in 1952 of the 3rd Lord Leconfield, who had given Petworth to the National Trust in 1947, and whose nephew and heir, John Wyndham, 6th Lord Leconfield and 1st Lord Egremont (1920-72) arranged for the acceptance of the major portion of the collections at Petworth in lieu of death duties (the first ever such arrangement) in 1956 by H.M.Treasury.
Makers and roles
possibly Francis Clein [also Cleyn] (Rostock 1582 – London 1658), designer
References
Rowell 2012 : Christopher Rowell, Petworth, The People and the Place, Scala, 2012, pp.125-6 Drury, 1984: Martin Drury. “Italian furniture in National Trust houses.” Furniture History, vol. XX, 1984., p.39 Jackson-Stops 1985: Gervase Jackson-Stops (ed.), The Treasure Houses of Britain: five hundred years of private patronage and art collecting, exh. cat. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, New Haven and London 1985, pp.134-5 Jackson-Stops, 1977: Gervase Jackson-Stops. “The furniture at Petworth.” Apollo 105.183 (1977): pp.358-66., p.358 Peck 2005: Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press 2005, p. 218 Walpole, 1765: Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (Strawberry Hill, 1762-80), Volume II Jervis, 1997: S. Jervis: ‘Furniture for the First Duke of Buckingham’, Furniture History (1997), Vol. XXIII, 50-6 Jellinek, 2009: T. Jellinek, Early British Chairs and Seats: 1500 to 1700 (ACC Art Books, Woodbridge, 2009), p. 131