An important pair of George II walnut side chairs attributed to Giles Grendey circa 1750

The Collection of Arthur Leidesdorf, sold Sotheby’s, London, ‘A Collection of English Furniture, Barometers & Clocks, formed by a Gentleman residing in New York’, June 27, 28, 1974, lot 8 (three pairs)

Sotheby’s, London, anonymous sale, June 3, 1977, lot 102

Christie’s, New York, anonymous sale, October 17, 1981, lot 201

These chairs can be firmly attributed to the London cabinet-maker Giles Grendey (b. 1693-d. 1780).  Grendey was apprenticed in 1709 to the London joiner William Sherborne, becoming free in 1716. Taking his own apprentices by 1726, he was elected to the Livery of the Joiner’s Company in 1729. His first workshop was at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, moving to premises in St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell in 1722, where he developed a thriving export trade. It was reported in various newspapers on August 7, 1731, including the Daily Post and Daily Advertiser, that a fire which started on adjacent premises to Mr Grendey, a ‘Cabinet-Maker and Chair-Maker’, caused him to lose furniture to the value of £1,000, which ‘he had pack’d for Exportation against the next morning’. His most famous recorded commission came from the Duke of Infantado, Lazcano, northern Spain, who acquired a suite of some seventy pieces of scarlet-japanned furniture including cabinets, tables, torchères, mirrors and seat furniture. Many of these retained Grendey's printed paper trade label, together with a number of stamped initials which can be identified with the names of his apprentices. These labels and initials have allowed a number of attributions to be made expanding his oeuvre, his actual documented work being very sparse.

The present chairs are related to a number of similar sets attributed to Grendey several of which are stamped with the initials of his known apprentices. A large group of these are in the collection at Stourhead, Wiltshire, of which twelve are in parcel-gilt walnut and fourteen in mahogany; Henry Hoare’s account books record several payments to Grendey including £64 for chairs on April 7, 1746, and further unspecified payments on March 27, 1951 and June 24, 1752 for £133 2s 9d, and £10 17s. respectively.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The Antique Collector, October 1956, ‘The Chair with a Shell Back’, R. W. Symonds, pp. 177- 182, figs. 5-12

Anthony Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, 1968, fig. 140

Edward Lennox-Boyd, editor, Masterpieces of English Furniture – The Gerstenfeld Collection, 1998, p. 38, pl. 24, p. 209, p. 209, cat. no.35