A Pair of George IV Carved Oak Armchairs, Circa 1830

Supplied to Mathew Wilson IV Esq., Eshton Hall, Craven, Yorkshire, circa 1830, thence by descent;

Sotheby's London, 15 November 1991, lot 154;

Hyde Park Antiques, New York;

Heritage Auctions, Dallas, 26 May 2010, lot 69091.

Frances Collard, Regency Furniture, London 1985, p. 160

The current Eshton Hall in North Yorkshire was built in 1825-1827 in the Elizabethan style for the local solicitor and landowner Matthew Wilson, replacing an earlier Georgian structure. This pair forms part of a larger suite of armchairs, side chairs and sofa which although constructed in oak, the timber most often used for furniture during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, are designed not in the same Tudor revival manner as the house but rather in the late George II taste of the 1750s, making them a rare early example of the neo-Rococo style of the nineteenth century. Interestingly, the form of the back is clearly based on plate XX of Chippendale's Director (1754), the same design source for the pair of George II mahogany armchairs that appear as lot 59 in this sale.

The suite was probably made by the Bradford cabinetmaker Joseph Williamson, recorded in Darley Street from 1822-29. A print showing the chairs in situ in the library at Eshton was published in 1836 in TF Dibdin's Reminiscences of a Literary Life and reproduced in Frances Collard, Regency Furniture, p.160.