Armchair
Category
Furniture
Date
circa 1680
Materials
Ebony, turned and carved, cane seat
Measurements
765 x 505 x 490 mm
Place of origin
Coromandel Coast
Order this imageCollection
Charlecote Park, Warwickshire
NT 533026
Summary
An East Indian carved ebony low-seat armchair, made on the Coromandel Coast, circa 1680, the top rail and crest carved with foliage and a winged female figure, above a double row of turned balusters, the side rails surmounted by seated figure finials, the square cane seat above festoon shaped seat rails, on twist-turned legs joined by twist-turned stretchers. The mid-seventeenth century ebony furniture produced in the Coromandel coast of India was very fashionable in the early years of the nineteenth century, especially sets of carved ebony chairs. In the 1750s Horace Walpole (1717-1797) acquired many pieces of such carved furniture for his Gothic house of Strawberry Hill. He believed they were surviving examples of early English furniture based on their existence in houses with Tudor associations, notably Esher Place, Surrey, where he believed them to have been the property of Cardinal Wolsey. William Beckford (1760-1844) also had several examples of carved ebony chairs and cabinets at Fonthill Abbey, described in the sale catalogue as "Wolsey chairs" (1823). At Charlecote a few specimen can still be found ( NT 533024.1-2; NT 533025) including a sofa (NT 533023).
References
Jaffer 2001 : Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, a catalogue of the collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, London, V&A publications, 2001.