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Bought from F. C. Harper (a dealer), 78 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, £15 (V&A Archive, RP 12/354M); received 18 January 1912 Historical significance: This is a rare example of an upholstered backstool, retaining its upholstery, of the early 17th century. Very few others survive with their upholstery intact. Some sets of backstools survive at Knole in Kent, which range in condition from being almost untouched to heavily restored. These provide close comparisons for some of the upholstery materials in the present stool, including the webbing that supports the seat and the ticking case for the seat pad. The formation of the seat pad as a complete cushion - a ticking case filled with feathers - reveals the beginnings of the practice of upholstery. Before about 1600 fixed upholstery was unknown, and wooden chairs were made more comfortable with loose cushions. In the early 17th century the practice evolved of nailing down the cushion to the frame - as on this chair, in which the bottom panel of the cushion case can be seen through the base cloth. Only the cover is fixed to the frame in the manner that was to become conventional. This treatment typically results in the bulbous, overhanging sides seen on this chair. The same effect is often shown in portraits of the period, for example in a portrait of a young boy standing by a stool, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts, now at Compton Verney (Susan Jenkins, Compton Verney: Handbook (Compton Verney House Trust, 2004), pp. 98-99 (ill.)). The wool show cover, with appliqué embroidery, is not paralleled in the furniture at Knole, but interestingly a very similar blue wool is used in the unseen parts of a purple velvet suite in the Brown Gallery at Knole, comprising a square elbow chair, two X-frame stools and a low footstool. On the elbow chair the blue wool is used as a base cloth (fixed to the top of the rails to support the upholstery), and on the X-frame stools it is used as a bottoming cloth (fixed to the underside of the rails). The use of embroidered 'slips' - flowers and other motifs worked on canvas and then cut out to stitch to another textile - was very common in the late 16th and early 17th centuries (Donald King and Santina Levey, The Victoria and Albert Museum's Textile Collection: Embroidery in Britain from 1200 to 1750 (V&A Publications, 1993), p. 15). At Hardwick, for example, in an inventory taken in 1601, numerous cushions were listed in the Gallery, including 'an other long quition of grene velvett set with slips of nedleworke with grene and yellowe silk frenge, grene silke and gold tassells …, An other long quition of crimson velvet set with slips of nedleworke with grene red and yellowe silk frenge, tassells of Crimson silke and golde …', and so forth - these pieces rather more luxurious than the V&A's chair (Lindsay Boynton (ed.), The Hardwick Hall Inventories of 1601 (London: Furniture History Society, 1971), p. 28). Surviving examples of embroidered slips are in the V&A collection (King and Levey, op. cit., p. 15 and plates 25-28, 39-40), including a set of four unused flower motifs, not yet cut out from the canvas (ibid., plates 41-44).