Property from the Collections of Lily & Edmond J. Safra

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Lot 176
  • 176

An Important Pair of Irish George III Mahogany Hall Benches After a design by James Wyatt Circa 1800

Estimate
40,000 - 60,000 USD
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Description

  • height 33 1/2 in.; width overall 33 1/2 in.; width of seat 26 1/2 in.; depth 19 1/2 in.
  • 85.1 cm; 85.1 cm; 67.3 cm; 49.5 cm

Provenance

The Coote family, created Earls of Bellamont in 1767, Bellamont Forest, Co. Cavan, Ireland

Sold, Christie’s, London, The Property of a Gentleman, November 19, 1993, lot 28

Catalogue Note

A suite of mahogany hall chairs at Castlecoole, Co. Fermanagh are of almost identical profile to the present chairs, but have fluted seat rails, anthemion-carved brackets to the crest rails and different turning to the arms. Illustrated by Jourdain and Rose (op. cit.) and O'Reilly (op. cit., p. 95), the backs have the painted crest of the Corry family, Earls of Belmore. They were designed by James Wyatt, architect of Castlecoole, in the Grecian taste to furnish ‘The hall, empty and stately’ as he expressly wanted it, and ‘sparsely furnished’. Although Castlecoole was completed in 1798, the 1st Earl, who died in 1802, ran out of money before the interior was completed, the furnishing and decoration being carried out by his son, the 2nd Earl. This commission was entrusted to the prominent Dublin upholsterer, John Preston, whose account carefully details the work carried out between 1807 and 1825, the hall chairs being supplied by the Dublin cabinet-maker Kidd.

Besides the present chairs, a number of others are recorded, all differing in some detail from Wyatt’s original design and bearing the crests of prominent Irish families. 

See:

Margaret Jourdain & F. Rose, English Furniture The Georgian Period (1730-1830), p. 64, fig. 17, a mahogany hall seat, the property of the Earl of Belmore

Christopher Claxton Stevens and Stewart Whittington, 18th Century English Furniture – The Norman Adams Collection, 1985, p. 91, a similar pair with the crest of the Bowes-Daly Family

The GPA Irish Arts Review Yearbook 1989-1990, 1989, ‘Castle Coole, Co, Fermanagh’, George Mott, pp. 83-90

Jacqueline O’Brien and Desmond Guinness, Great Irish Houses and Castles, 1992, pp. 66-69, ‘Bellamont Forest’, and pp. 130-133, ‘Castle Coole’

Country Life, December 17, 1992, ‘Castle Coole, Co. Fermanagh’, John Cornforth, pp. 28-31, fig. 1

Christie’s London, Sale Catalogue, November 19, 1992, the Bowes-Daly pair

Country Life, January 20, 1993, ‘Around the Salerooms’, Huon Mallalieu, fig. 4, the Bowes-Daly pair    

Seán O’Reilly, Irish Houses and Gardens from the archives of Country Life, 1998, Castlecoole, Co. Fermanagh, pp. 92-99, the entrance hall, p. 95