Painted beech side chair with rush seat.

FPF313

Painted beech side chair with rush seat.

1780-1810

Painted beech side chair turned to simulate bamboo, with rush seat.

The frame of this beech side chair is turned and painted yellow to simulate bamboo. The back has posts continuous with the back legs, with turned tops, and four horizontal rails, the top two spaced apart and joined by seven turned vertical spindles. The rush seat, probably original, is woven around the seat rails, which have exposed corner blocks, and the edges are protected with slips of beech. The chair is raised on tapering and turned legs joined by turned double stretchers, the front stretchers simulating bamboo and the others plain.

Simulated, or faux bamboo in furniture became fashionable in the late 18th century as part of a revived interest in Chinese decorative arts. In Thomas Sheraton’s The Cabinet Dictionary (1803), ‘bambo’ or ‘bamboo’ was described as: ‘a kind of Indian reed, which in the East is used for chairs. They are in some degree imitated in England by turning beech into the same form, and making chairs of this fashion, painting them to match the colour of the reeds and cane’.

A set of painted bamboo chairs supplied in the 1780s or 1790s as part of a bedroom suite for David Garrick’s villa at Hampton, Middlesex are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, W.25-1917. Similarly, ‘36 Bamboo chairs japaned [sic]; the backs and seats caned £71’ were supplied by the Royal furniture-makers, Tatham and Bailey, to the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (Royal Collection, RCIN 655).

It is evident that faux bamboo chairs were being made from at least the early 1780s: a painted chair for Mrs Banks of Winstanley illustrated in the Gillow’s Estimate Sketch Book in February 1784, was described in the index as a ‘bamboo’ chair, and on their despatch in March 1784 as: ‘… 8 neat bamboo chairs painted with black ground & yellow flutes & c. also rush bottoms @ 16s’ (Stuart, 2010).

In 1797, an American maker, William Challen, advertised: ‘Fancy chair maker from London… makes all sorts of dyed, japanned and bamboo chairs, settees, etc., every article in the fancy chair line executed in the newest and most improved London patterns’ (Jourdain, 1946).

Simulated bamboo chairs remained popular into the 1850s, as evidenced by a chair attributed to William Smee & Sons, c. 1840 (Boram, 2010).

The chair is in good original condition, with much of the original paintwork.
Two slips of beech from the seat rail are missing, and the right hand slip is loose.
Some damage to the rush-work.

Beech.
Rush.

H. 84
W. 46
D. 48

4097. 3292.
4097 is probably the OM number, 3292 is probably the pattern number.

Not recorded but in the Collection prior to 1993.

Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, W.25-1917. Chair | Pratt | V&A Explore The Collections
Brighton Pavilion chairs: Explore the Royal Collection Online 
S. Stuart, ‘More about Gillows’ Windsor and Common Chairs’, Regional Furniture, Vol. XXIV, 2010, p. 110, Fig. 23; p. 106, Fig. 19.
Jourdain, ‘Bamboo Furniture’, Country Life, 19 July 1946, p. 115.
ed. L. Boynton, Gillow Furniture Designs 1760-1800, London, 1995, Fig. 258.
J. Boram, ‘Makers of ‘Dy’d, Fancy and Japan’d Chairs’, Regional Furniture, Vol. XXIV, 2010, p. 57, Fig. 8; pp. 64-65, Figs. 19, 20; p. 71.
See also: J. Boram, ‘A Regional Perspective on the Innovative Development of Light Chairs’, Regional Furniture, Vol. XXVI, 2012, pp. 149-176.