CIRCA 1820-30

The 'Gainsborough' armchair with lion mask terminals and distinctive arm supports displaying carved foliage on a ground of rockwork relates closely to a group, dated circa 1740, of which at least twelve examples are known and which probably constituted a set. These include: one chair formerly in the collection of Percival D. Griffiths, the pre-eminent collector of English Furniture of the last century; a pair in the Gerstenfeld Collection, subsequently sold from the collection of Theodore and Ruth Baum in New York in October 2004; a single armchair in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight; and a further armchair and stool at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The model with its bold and rich carving is very much in the manner of furniture supplied to the New Treasury, Whitehall by Robert Sapp in 1740 (Ed. E. Lennox-Boyd, Masterpieces of English Furniture, London, 1998, p. 215, no. 47), though for so magnificent a set of chairs no definitive attribution has yet been made.