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Lot Essay
It has not been possible to find reference in surviving documents in the West Dean archive to the presence of these chairs at West Dean in the 19th Century. However, their very existence there, in a house designed by James Wyatt, for which Ackermann records in 1827 that Wyatt’s ‘judgement even extended to much of the …furniture’, and the close proximity of their exceptional design to Wyatt’s known work (see lot 76 for further discussion of Wyatt’s work at West Dean) lends confidence to the attribution of their design to Wyatt.
The superb craftsmanship and timbers employed suggest that these chairs originate from one of the significant workshops of the day, one strong candidate being Gillows, with whom Wyatt had a relationship which stretched back as far as 1774, and who produced related Gothic mahogany chairs such as those supplied for the Jury Room, Lancaster Castle, in 1801 (S. Stuart, Gillows, London, 2008, vol. I, p. 205).
The superb craftsmanship and timbers employed suggest that these chairs originate from one of the significant workshops of the day, one strong candidate being Gillows, with whom Wyatt had a relationship which stretched back as far as 1774, and who produced related Gothic mahogany chairs such as those supplied for the Jury Room, Lancaster Castle, in 1801 (S. Stuart, Gillows, London, 2008, vol. I, p. 205).