A SET OF SIXTEEN GEORGE IV MAHOGANY DINING CHAIRS, CIRCA 1820, ALMOST CERTAINLY BY GILLOWS

Almost certainly acquired by Robert Berkeley (1764-1845) for the Dining Room

Inventory, 1893, ’17 [sic] mahogany chairs in leather’ in the Dining Room;

Inventory, 1949, 'A set of 17 [sic] late Georgian mahogany dining chairs' in the Dining Room

Comparative Literature

Susan Stewart, Gillows of Lancaster and London, 1730-1840, Woodbridge, 2008, vol. I, pp. 218-223, and vol. II, p. 368, pl. GG12.

This long run of Grecian inspired dining chairs were almost certainly supplied by Gillows to Robert Berkeley (1764-1845) for the Dining Room at Spetchley Park, shortly after the house was completed in 1821.

The pattern features in a drawing from the firm's Estimate Sketch Book of 1823 (fig. 1) and an undated room setting for an anonymous customer of Gillow & Co. of Oxford Street. Robert Berkeley is himself listed in the Estimate Sketch Book of 1824 which illustrates two designs for press cupboards dated 10 November 1824, one of which remains in the collection at Spetchley and cost ‘£19.18.73’.

Seven of the sixteen chairs are stamped ‘T. Bradley’ or ‘TB’. The stamp is most likely that of Thomas Bradley, a Lancastrian who apprenticed for cabinet-maker Isaac Greenwood in 1790 before becoming a Lancaster freeman in 1799-1800. Interestingly, at the time when his son William became a freeman in 1817-1818, Bradley Snr is listed as a cabinet-maker in Lancaster (Stewart, op. cit., p. 221). A closely related set of nine mahogany dining chairs – also bearing the ‘T. Bradley’ stamp – were supplied by Gillows in 1823 to Thomas John Wynn (d. 1832), 2nd Baron Newborough, for Glynllifon, Caernarvonshire, Wales (sold Christie's, London, 9 March 2000, lot 104 (£19,000)).