Provenance & Patina: Important English Furniture from a West Coast Collection
Provenance & Patina: Important English Furniture from a West Coast Collection
A George I Burr Walnut Settee Attributed to Giles Grendey, Circa 1720
Auction Closed
June 18, 08:33 PM GMT
Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
solid and burr walnut veneered double chair back settee with shaped splats, the crest rail carved with shells and acanthus above roundels, and a drop in seat covered in 18th-century floral needlework, the cabriole legs carved with shells and terminating in ball and claw feet
height 42 in.; width 58 ½ in.; depth 29 in.
106.7 cm; 148.6 cm; 73.7 cm
Edward Hurst, Salisbury;
Rolleston, London.
A closely related two-seat settee attributed to Giles Grendey, differing only in very small details of carving and in its eagle-form armrests, is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery.1 This settee has the same paterae details, claw-and-ball-feet, scallop shell to the top rail and even the silhouette of the vase-form splat; notably, the border of the carving to the top rail differs slightly on this lot, but is replicated on a different chair in the same suite.2 The consistency across these different features raises the possibility that the present lot belonged to the same suite, and Lucy Wood states that the Lady Lever group "is evidently part of a larger suite".3
Another settee to this design sold at Sotheby's London, 4 July 1997, lot 31. Another was in the Percival Griffiths collection, illustrated in Jussel's study of the Griffiths collection4 and Macquoid's Dictionary of English Furniture.5 Percival D. Griffiths (1862-1937) formed an iconic collection of English furniture from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, advised by the furniture historian Robert Wemyss Symonds (1889-1958). London-born Griffiths lived with his collection in an eighteenth-century house with no electricity located in Sandridgebury, Hertfordshire. Some pieces from his collection are now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (W.34-1939 to W.37-1938 and others entered the celebrated collection of Irwin Untermyer bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Chairs in this style attributed to Grendey have a consistent form but some variation in their level of decoration, probably as a way of accommodating the relative budgets and tastes of clientele. A more luxurious set of Grendey chairs, with a richly carved seat rail and additional carved leaves connecting the splat and the uprights, sold at Sotheby's London, 5 July 2022, lot 11. A further set of chairs attributed to Grendey and of similar form sold at Sotheby's London, The Personal Collection of the late Sir Joseph Hotung, 8 December 2022, lot 285.
1 Lucy Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, New Haven, 2008, vol. I, no. 20, pp.245-263.
2 Ibid., fig. xiii 20 B & G.
3 Ibid., p.252
4 Christian Jussel, English Furniture 1680-1760, The Percival D. Griffiths Collection, London, 2023, vol.I, no. 128, p. 141.
5 Percy Macquoid and Ralph Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, Wappingers' Falls, 1954, vol.III, colour plate V facing p.83.