A pair of Victorian oak and caned side chairs designed by George Edmund Street and manufactured by Gillows, circa 1882

These strikingly modern looking chairs were designed by the architect George Edmund Street (1824-1881) as part of the furnishings of the Law Courts (now the Royal Courts of Justice) on the Strand, London. The chairs were manufactured by Gillows of Lancaster and a drawing of the design, dated September 1882, is preserved in the Gillows Archive in the City of Westminster Library.

Street was a leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic Revival, although the present chairs clearly draw influence from the ancient Greek klismos. He is best-known for the Law Courts commission for which a competition was conducted in 1866–67. Construction began in 1874 and the building was completed in 1882, a year after Street’s death and presumably when production began in the Gillows workshops.

Other examples of the present chairs can be found in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (Acc. No. W.8-1990) and the Metropolitan Museum, New York (Acc. No. 2015.544).