The upholstery method -- with a cushion resting in a well over a four-sided valance -- is a very rare survival. Another upholstered stool fitted with a cushion – but a much thinner one – is shown in a Baroque interior of 1721 by Jan Vierpyl (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; see Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), p. 87, fig. 66). Even more remarkable is the use of ribbon bows to tie the valance down at the four corners of its platform, since these would never be seen when the cushion was in place -- and the depth of the well is such that the stool could never be used without the cushion. Although we now see this in the stool as restored around 1800, it almost certainly replicates the technique used when the stool was first made around 1700--10, since remnants of a blue ribbon survive at the corners, sewn to the stuffing-cover beneath the valance. No other instance of this usage is known, but a parallel custom is the contemporary (early 18th-century) use of decorative tufting on the seat platforms of sofas, beneath a deep cushion. Examples of the latter usage are a settee of ca. 1700--05 from Hampton Court, Herefordshire, in the V&A (Museum no. W.15-1945), and another ca. 1710 at Lyme Park, Cheshire (see Lucy Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 22, figs 30--31, 54).