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Purchased from the wife of the dealer Mr John Hunt, 149 Old Church Street, London, SW3. Notes from R.P. 53/3425 Listed on purchase form As "chair, painted wood - Early 17th c. English -- £320" 2/11/53, letter from Ralph Edwards to John Hunt requests a reduction in price for the chair which he describes as "an interesting wreck". 5/11/53 response fixes the price at £320. 11/11/53, minute of Ralph Edwards to the Directors stating that the armchair is "a desirable acquisition at £320 - an exceedingly rare specimen of painted furniture of the early 17th century. Very few painted chairs of this kind are known". 21/11/53, account for the chair by Hunt "An armchair, with columnar legs connected by plain stretchers, and scroll ended arms decorated with formalized flowers and leaves in brilliant colours of silver gilded gesso ground. English circa 1600, - 320.00." In 1924 the furniture scholar, Margaret Jourdain, noted that a fragment of Turkey work had been found on the chair and she suggested that this was part of a later scheme of upholstery. It would certainly not have been grand enough as an original scheme, which would certainly have been in silk or silk velvet. No trace of Turkey-work can now be found. It was possibly on the seat, which we know was stripped of all but the base cloth in 1924. Furniture of the late 16th and early 17th centuries was sometimes gilded and painted, to echo the use of very rich textiles in upholstery. This method of decoration, however, was extremely fragile and has often been lost, the woodwork of such chairs sometimes stripped to tidy up a scheme that suffered much loss. For this reason, this chair is much prized, although its painted surface is not in good condition. Chairs with similar decoration are known at Knole Kent, dated to about 1635-40. They show gilded arabesques on a red ground and retain their original red silk upholstery. The painting, however, was considerably overpainted in the early 1950s. Nicholas |Humphrey recognized that a single armchair, with very similar gilded decoration on a blue ground (but with entirely renewed upholstery) is in Exeter cathedral and this probably gives the best indication of how the armchair woodwork was intended to look. In that case, the arms are not upholstered, but are decorated in a similar fashion to the rest of the frame. They show the same mid-way notch on the underside as on the V&A chair. In 1994 curator James Yorke wrote a paper (see refs) on painted furniture made for Queen Henrietta Marie by Philip Bromefield between 1626 and 1642, with very similar sounding gilded decoration and flower painting. He also published entries from inventories for Oatlands, Surrey for Queen Anne of Denmark's furniture in 1616-18, which also listed similarly decorated furniture e.g. 'painted with white and gold and spotted with red flowers'. He did not suggest that Bromefield was the painter of the V&A chair, but his paper well illustrates the taste for such furnishing in courtly circles in the first half of the 17th century. He did, however, suggest that the decoration might have drawn on Adrian Collaert's Florilegium, published in Antwerp in about 1590, or a similar publication, for images for the flowers (see V&A E.524-1991 for a sample plate). In 1998 the upholstery was examined by the curator Frances Collard and the conservation upholsterer Derek Balfour, who filed a report on their findings after a short inspection. A copy of this is in departmental files. A summary of the conclusions was that the arm upholstery appears to be original, though mounted on later velvet, with some conservation. It shows the use of metal-thread triming, fragments of which can be seen behind the PL upright on the back. The inside back appears to be original. Fragments under nails suggest that the trimming used on the arms was also used up the sides of the back. It was presumably carried along the top of the back although there is no evidence for this. This trimming may have been a narrower version of the fringe that has left a shadow mark across the centre of the back. There is no sign of an outside back, although tack holes suggest one might have been there. DB and FC considered that it might have been of leather for strength, as fragments of leather were found inside the stiles. There is no evidence of webbing to the back. The lower rail may have been an insertion rather than a replacement as neither the Juxon chair (V&A, W. 12-1928) nor the chairs at Knole, Kent, had rails in the lower back originally. They noted that the top rail was probably early 20th century. They noted tack holes all the way down the outer edge of the back to the seat cover. They considered that the stitching across the centre of the inside back, could relate to the fringing that was clearly once in this position on the front face of the back. They believed that the base cloth and webbing of the seat could be original. The double-warp linen is similar to that on the Dolphin chairs at Ham House, but finer, and similar to that on the chairs at Knole.