A PAIR OF ANGLO-INDIAN SOLID CALAMANDER BERGERES

These comfortable bergeres or 'Drawing Room Fauteuils,' with their palm-wrapped 'tablet' rails and legs, are designed in the robust George IV Grecian style popularised by George Smith's Cabinet-Maker and Upholster's Guide, 1826.
The use of richly figured timbers such as calamander was not uncommon in English nineteenth-century furniture. With these bergeres the calamander is used through out rather than as a decorative veneer, recommending they were made in Ceylon. It has been suggested that calamander was by no means as common for furniture as was ebony, satinwood or jackwood due to its high price and relative scarcity (A. Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon, London, 2001, p. 367.).