Edward Welby Pugin

Acquired from Galerie du Passage, Paris, France in 2019 by the present owner

Private collection, United Kingdom 

Jeremy Cooper, Victorian & Edwardian Furniture & Interiors, London, 1987, p. 117

This chair is derived from a distinctive model designed by Edward Welby Pugin (1834-1875) for the Granville Hotel in Ramsgate, United Kingdom. After the death in 1852 of his father Augustus Welby Pugin, the esteemed Neo-Gothic architect and designer, Edward Welby Pugin took over the family business aged just eighteen. His styles were essentially a continuation of the assertive Gothic Revivalism that had made his father such a leading figure in Victorian decoration and ornament, as is evident in his most famous work, this 'Granville' suite. The deliberately archaic tusked-tenon joint brings a simplicity of construction fully in harmony with the medievalism of A W Pugin: indeed, we see his father use it in the well-known model of chair he designed for his home in Ramsgate called The Grange, of which there is an example in the National Museum Wales, accession number NMW A 51554. In a letter that A W Pugin sent to J G Crace in 1850, he sketches a tusked tenon with the caption "the old joint" and wryly illustrates a "modern joint" with a mere pot of glue.¹

Edward Welby Pugin, then, was more than ready to continue his father's principles of design, infusing them with an additional individuality for this suite intended for the Granville Hotel. This hotel in Ramsgate was a commission of grand scale - somewhat too grand, in fact, since the hotel ended up filing for bankruptcy in 1873. This chair proved popular, though, and was produced in larger scale throughout the 1870s by church furniture manufacturers such as Cox & Sons and C & R Light. There are small variations to the design, mainly to the number of holes in the legs.

The original design for this chair is kept at the National Archives in Kew, BT/43/58, number 245877, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have an example with five holes on display in New York, accession number 2018.817. An 1864 chair by by Edward Welby Pugin of similar form is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession number W.1-1991.

¹ Clive Wainwright, 'Furniture', in Pugin; A Gothic Passion, ed. Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright, 1994, p141