A LARGE MAHOGANY OPEN ARMCHAIR

This chair is copied from the architect Sir John Soane's 'Chippendale chair', displayed at his museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields; and it forms part of a suite of related seat-furniture discussed by Eben Howard Gay in his Chippendale Romance, New York, 1915 (R.W. Symonds, 'Furniture in the Soane Museum', Country Life, 27 January 1950, pp. 220-1). Its serpentine frame is embellished with arabesque satyr masks emerging from bacchic lion feet and with garland-bearing eagle's heads in the 'antique' manner promoted by William Kent, Master Carpenter to King George II. The voluted cartouche splat derives from engravings by Johann Lauch (fl. 1724-57), such as were plagiarised in Thomas and Batty Langley, The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs, 1740.