A Set of Eight Antique Queen Anne Style Red-Lacquered and Gilt Chinoiserie Side Chairs

A Set of Eight Queen Anne Style Red-Lacquered and Gilt Chinoiserie Side Chairs

Each chair with a shaped and arched cresting rail surmounted by a carved and gilded acanthus and scroll pediment of exuberant foliate character, above a broad vasiform splat richly decorated in raised chinoiserie polychrome lacquer depicting figures in landscape settings with pavilions, blossoming branches and rockwork, all reserved against the deep vermilion ground, above a shaped seat rail of serpentine outline similarly enriched with lacquer decoration centred by a gilt cartouche, the caned seat within a conforming frame, raised on cabriole front legs with pad feet and square-section rear legs united by a plain H-stretcher.

The entire surface in scarlet and black lacquer heightened with gilt chinoiserie ornament throughout, the gilded cresting retaining original gilding.

Spanish, Late 19th Century

The present chairs combine the formal vocabulary of the English Queen Anne period — the vasiform splat, the cabriole leg, the caned seat, the scrolled and carved cresting — with a decorative programme that is wholly in the Anglo-Dutch chinoiserie tradition, the raised polychrome lacquer figures and landscapes applied with considerable confidence and detail over the scarlet ground.

The bold vermilion, deployed here at a scale that would have made these chairs among the most visually arresting objects in any early eighteenth-century interior, is characteristic of the japanned work of that period, when the colour was understood to evoke the prestigious Chinese and Japanese lacquers it sought to emulate.