These banqueting hall chairs, elegantly sculpted in richly figured mahogany, are designed in the robust Grecian fashion promoted around 1800 by architects such as Sir John Soane (d.1837) and Sir Robert Smirke (d.1867), his former pupil and author of Specimens of Continental Architecture, 1806.

The reeded ribbons that are incised in the seat tops, together with the patera were amongst architectural ornament popularised by Soane, while the chamfered legs relate to those of hall seats introduced at Eastnor Castle, Hertfordshire, where Smirke was employed around 1812. The same cabinet/chair-maker would appear to have executed the hall chairs supplied to George Watson Taylor (d.1841), who employed Smirke to modernise a Cavendish Square house acquired in 1816



Sir Robert Smirke (1780- 1867), whose Specimens of Continental Architecture, appeared in 1806 after his four year study in Italy and Greece, supervised the British Museum's display of the Elgin Marbles in 1816.

English, Circa 1815-20