AN IMPORTANT PAIR OF GEORGE III CARVED GILT WOOD ARM CHAIRS circa 1770

each chair with a cartouche-shaped back upholstered en chassis, the molded frame centered at the top with a foliate clasp issuing at each side strings of husks and pearl beading, continuing to rising acanthus leaves above the curved padded arms, the bases fluted and centered by a sunflower carved patera, the arms with scrolled terminals carved with acanthus leaves above curved molded supports with pearl beading with rising acanthus leaves at the base, the upholstered seats within serpentine form molded seat rails carved with fluting and centered by a sunflower patera, continuing to cabriole legs with sunflowers at the knees and with scrolled toes, the sides and back legs similarly carved.

Almost certainly supplied to Simon, 1st Earl Harcourt (d.1777) for Nuneham Park
Thence by descent, photographed in the Drawing Room at Nuneham Park, circa 1906, and latterly at Stanton Harcourt

Sotheby's, New York, October 11, 1996, lot 214, Property from a Private Collection, New York and Palm Beach

This suite of armchairs (lots 104 to 107) are formally identical with a large suite of seat furniture in both mahogany and giltwood, currently at Althorp, and seemingly commissioned by John, 1st Earl Spencer (1734-1783) for Spencer House, St. James's. Both the Harcourt and Spencer suites are traditionally related to chairs documented as supplied by John Gordon to the Duke of Atholl at Blair Castle in the late 1740s and 1750s (Anthony Coleridge, `Chippendale, The Director, and some Cabinet-Makers at Blair Castle,' Connoisseur, December 1960, pp. 252-256). Beyond more general formal and proportional similarities, they share a cupid's bow-shaped seatrail which in all suites is copied exactly between the front- and siderails. Consequently the Spencer, and by analogy the present, suite have been variously attributed to Gordon by Anthony Coleridge, Peter Thornton and John Hardy (although Coleridge suggests the more enigmatic and almost entirely undocumented William Gordon, see Anthony Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, 1968, pp. 50-1, pls. 84-7 and Peter Thornton and John Hardy, `The Spencer Furniture at Althorp - II,' Apollo, June 1968, pp. 440-451).

The Harcourt papers have revealed several minor cabinet-makers as working at Nuneham around this date, but none seem a likely candidate for this commission. The Spencer archive (preserved in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum), however, provides further evidence of the involvement of John Gordon. He apparently enjoyed a close relationship within the household of the 1st Earl Spencer, appointing the Earl's steward as an executor of his will in 1778. Various bills survive to the firm of Gordon and Taitt, a partnership formed between John Gordon and John Taitt in 1767, itemizing upholostery and repair work for Spencer houses at Wimbledon, St. James's and Northamptonshire. Notably, in 1772, they repaired, mended and re-gilded the celebrated John Vardy hall light at Spencer House (see Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert, The Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, 1986, pp. 355-7). Unfortunately the papers of the 1st Earl appear to have been burnt on his death by his widow and thus possible evidence of their work in the 1760s has disappeared.

The issue of the design of the chairs is unresolved. Drawings for furniture by James `Athenian' Stuart for Spencer House survive, along with a corpus of furniture indisputably to his design. Moreover, Stuart is recorded as working at Nuneham for the Earl Harcourt in the 1750s and early 1760s. All were members of Society of Dilettanti: Harcourt was a founder member in 1736; Spencer was admitted in 1765; whilst Stuart was proposed in 1751. Stuart, therefore, emerges as the most likely link between these two commissions for identical suites of chairs. Moreover, beyond chimneypieces and variously architectural details that Stuart is known to have altered at Nuneham, he is also recorded as having designed at least one piece of furniture. A bill from John Adair, preserved among the surviving Harcourt papers on deposit in the Bodleian, lists furniture supplied to `The R^t Hon^ble Earl Harcourt' in 1763 and 1764. For 4 August 1764:
`To 2 Rich Oval Burnish gold Glass frames, Newnham 11 14 -
To 2 Bracket Tables under D^o: by M^r Stuart - 16 --'
(MS. D.D. Harcourt, Harcourt Estate Papers, circa174).

The account was evidently not settled and towards the end of the decade, John Adair, submitted a further list of items supplied to Earl Harcourt where the same tables are described more clearly as `after Mr Stuart's design' (MS. D.D. Harcourt, Harcourt Estate Papers, c.175). Interestingly, Adair was also supplying the chimneypieces in 1768 and it is therefore unclear if he was making the furniture he was supplying or simply acting as an agent.

Adair was a carver and gilder working from St. Ann's Court, Covent Garden from 1749 and established in Wardour Street, Soho from 1763. Later in the decade he appears to have gone into partnership with William Adair, who in 1773 was described as a joiner to His Majesty's Privy Chamber. They appear to have borne some relationship with James Stuart, as the Bowood manuscripts show that they supplied goods and carried out work `by order of Mr. Stuart' (Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert, op. cit., p. 2), and John Adair worked at Shugborough at the same time that the architect was completing his work there.

This chair appears to be the only example of this model, either in the Harcourt collection or at Althorp, to retain its original oil gilding, making it a rare document of the maker's original intentions. Another pair, formerly at Nuneham, sold Sotheby's, New York, October 11, 1996, lot 214.