AFTER A DESIGN BY THOMAS CHIPPENDALE, CIRCA 1755

The ‘ribbon-back’ chair, named for the elaborate ribbon motifs incorporated into the carving on the chair backs, is one of the most recognized designs published in Thomas Chippendale’s renowned pattern book, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director and is often viewed as synonymous with his style. A perhaps unsurprising by-product of the enduring universal association between this chair-pattern and the most famous English cabinet-maker, is the large number of ‘avowed reproductions’ and outright fakes in circulation, sharply contrasting with the very small surviving number of genuine 18th century examples, which includes the present chairs. Closely related chair patterns also featured on the trade cards of Chippendale's contemporaries William Henshaw, cabinet-maker and upholsterer and subscriber to Chippendale's Director, St Paul's Church Yard (1754 - 73) and William Jellicoe, upholsterer, appraiser and undertaker of Fleet Street (1760 - 81). Lucy Wood states that either Henshaw or Jellicoe could be considered likely candidates to have supplied the chairs. The wholesale adoption of Chippendale's innovative and imaginative designs by others demonstrates his towering influence over the furniture trade in the mid-18th century (L. Wood, op. cit.,pp. 241-243)

The present pair is directly derived from the design for a chair in plate XVI of Chippendale’s Director. It is originally from a suite of eight chairs traced to Dillington House in Somerset. As Lucy Wood discusses in her article, Dillington House was acquired by the Hanning family in the early 19th century and ‘Gothicized’ by John Lee Lee (Hanning) (1802-1874) in the 1830s. Thus, Wood’s research indicates the suite was most likely acquired by Thomas Harvard, (John Lee Lee’s great-great-grandfather) to furnish his nearby Barrington Court, an Elizabethan manor he purchased in 1756. Barrington Court remained in the Hanning family but because they began living primarily at Dillington House by the early 19th century, Barrington was eventually rented out and ultimately sold before 1858 (A. Baggs & R. Bush, A History of the County of Somerset, v. 4, London, 1978, pp. 113-121). Therefore, the suite of ribbon-back chairs were moved to Dillington prior to the sale. Indeed, inventories taken at Dillington in 1874 and 1882 record ‘6 Carved Mahogany Antique Chairs’ in the Drawing Room, and ‘2 Carved Mahogany Chairs’ in the Dining Room which likely constitute the suite of eight.

The suite remained at Dillington House and passed by inheritance to Elizabeth Cameron (nee Vaughn-Lee), who lent them to the National Trust at Montacute House from 1948-1979, from which an old loan inventory card records them as a set of eight. Hotspur Ltd. later acquired six from the suite and sold them in pairs. One pair from the collection of S. Jon Gerstenfeld, Washington D.C was sold Christie’s London, 7 July 1988, lot 77 (£82,500 including premium) and was subsequently in the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty, sold Christie’s New York, 23 October 2022, lot 554 ($214,200 including premium). A second pair is now in the Indianapolis museum of Arts [81.375, 81.376]. This is the third pair of the six that were with Hotspur.