Rosewood side chair with caned seat.

FPF345

Rosewood side chair with caned seat.

1820-1840

Rosewood side chair with tablet back and caned seat.

This rosewood side chair has a panelled tablet crest rail with carved scroll ends and paterae and a raised double scroll crest in the centre. The back posts are down-swept into the seat rails at the sides, and continuous with the back legs. Two horizontal rails in the back enclose a carved floret flanked by carved and pierced channel-moulded scrolls. The caned seat has front and back rails as well as inner side rails through which the cane is woven. The chair is raised on turned legs at the front that are knulled just below the seat rail and have carved fringes just above the ‘toupie’ feet (toupie is French for a spinning top). The back legs are tapered and flared. The caning has been replaced; the chair would have had a squab cushion, held in place by the raised side rails.

This form of side chair was fashionable from the early 1820s and remained so into the 1830s. Tablet-top chairs are described and illustrated in The London Chair-Makers’ and Carvers’ Book of Prices for Workmanship (1823) (Gloag, 1991). Related chairs were featured in Modern Style Exemplified (1829) and T. King’s Cabinet Maker’s Sketch Book (1835) (Joy, 1994).

The scrolled crest is replaced.
Part of the left scroll in the centre of the back is replaced.
Inner side seat rails and front and back rails all replaced in hardwood (not rosewood).
The cane is replaced and has some damage.

Rosewood.
Cane.

H. 89
W. 46
D. 51

Not recorded, but in the Collection prior to 1993.

J. Gloag, A Complete Dictionary of Furniture, revised and expanded by C. Edwards, Woodstock, 1991, p. 660.
E. Joy, Pictorial Dictionary of British 19th Century Furniture Design, Woodbridge, reprinted 1994, pp. 216-217.