This wonderful chair belongs to a suite of carved ebony seat furniture first recorded at Longleat House, Wiltshire, in 1740 and was probably acquired by Thomas, 1st Viscount Weymouth (1640-1714) for the ‘Best Gallery’. It left Longleat in 1988 as part of a larger set, the majority now in the J. Paul Getty Museum (92.DA.24(1-12))¹.



The origin of these remarkable works of art was misunderstood for much of the 18^th and 19^th century, most probably as a result of one of the most enthusiastic collects ors of this material, Horace Walpole (1717-1797). Walpole owned a number of examples of side chairs of this type at Strawberry Hill, some of which can be seen in a widely publicized watercolour by John Carter (1788), and which feature in the celebrated sale of the contents of Strawberry Hill in 1842². Walpole had bought these chairs at auction in 1763, from a sale at Staughton House, Huntingdonshire, and he refers to his attendance at this sale in a letter from Huntingdon of 30 May 1763, to his friend George Montagu.

‘I believe I am the first man that ever went sixty miles to an auction. As I came for ebony, I have been up to my chin in ebony; there is literally nothing but ebony in the house; all the other goods, if there were any, and I trust my Lady Conyers did not sleep upon ebony mattresses, are taken away. There are two tables and eighteen chairs, all made by the Hallett of two hundred years ago. These I intend to have; for mind, the auction does not begin until Thursday. There are more plebian chairs of the same materials, but I have left commissions for only the true black blood’³.

A combination of the rectilinear form, turned legs, profuse carving and the proliferation of examples in houses with Tudor associations, led contemporary commentators to conclude the chairs were Elizabethan. The myth was perpetuated with the publication of Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1832-36) which illustrated a chair belonging to Walpole as early 17^th century English.

Carved ebony furniture of this type was in fact made throughout South Asia in the second half of the 17th century, notably along the Coromandel Coast, India. The dating of this furniture is nuanced, with Jan Veenendaal’s seminal text providing a framework based on the treatment of the relief carving and other stylistic qualities. The present chair is categorised as type ‘C’ displaying a profusion of low-relief scrolling designs to the frame in combination with pierced backs carved a mix Christian and Hindu motifs – the finials to the uprights often in the form of birds – and are likely to date to 1660-1680. Later pieces, carved in high-relief with bold flowers, originate further afield as the VOC expanded their territories in Ceylon and Batavia. Amin Jaffer notes that ebony furniture in 18^th century English collects ions such as Longleat, Boughton and Strawberry Hill is exclusively made up of pieces that pre-date 1680 on stylistic grounds. Access to Ceylonese ebony furniture really only occurred once the island went under British control in 1796⁴ leading to the 19^th century craze for ebony.

For other examples see a pair of ebony chairs of this type at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, are traditionally said to have come to England from Portugal in 1662, as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry⁵. Similar pieces of ebony furniture were at William Beckford’s Fonthill, six chairs of which were bought by the dealer John Swaby in the sale of 1823, possibly the same six which were presented by the Duke of York to George IV in 1824 for Windsor Castle, where they remain, and where there are other ebony chairs of this type. A group of ebony chairs and other furniture survives at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Cothele House, Cornwall, has ebony furniture definitely known to have been there since the 18th century because of an embroidered inscription on the maroon velvet cushions of an ebony settee, recording the visit to the house of George III and Queen Charlotte in 1789 and the fact that they sat on the settee whilst breakfasting, and the Victoria & Albert Museum has a chair of this type (ref. 413-1882), bought from the Hamilton Palace sale and previously also owned by Beckford. A rare ebony centre table of this type, sold to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1981, was in the recent major exhibition Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, 2009-2010.

¹ Acquired from Rainer Zietz Ltd., London.

² Interestingly, Horace Walpole must have seen the present lot, as he had remarked on the ebony chairs at Longleat when visiting the house in July, 1762, and this visit may well have encouraged his purchases from Staughton House in the following year.

³ Wainwright, op. cit., pp. 90 and 92.

⁴ Jaffer, op. cit., p. 134.

⁵ Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 1992, Vol. II, p. 225.