A two tier spindle-back armchair, on four cabriole legs, with outswept arms and a carved seat. With decorative turnings at the top of each spindle.

This hall chair follows the design of the well-documented Holkham Hall set of mahogany ‘Windsor’ hall armchairs, which were supplied to Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (d.1759) for the South Hall of Holkham Hall, Norfolk, plus the six matching singles. Today, some of the Holkham chairs still line the marble hall at Holkham Hall, the Norfolk seat of the Earls of Leicester (L. Schmidt et al, Holkham, Munich, 2005, plate II, p. 23).

The Holkham Hall chairs are not constructed in the usual manner of Windsor chairs, ‘as each leg is secured to the seat by two rectangular tenons, side by side, which slot into blind mortises in the underside of the seat’, rather than using the traditional method of socketing the legs of a Windsor chair into the seat. John Stabler and Paul A. Shutler suggest that: ‘the timber and the method of construction suggest that they were made by a joiner or cabinet maker rather than a Windsor chair maker’ (see John Stabler & Paul A. Shutler, ‘Mr Hamond’s Seats’ in the Regional Furniture Society Newsletter, Spring 2011, No. 54, p.3).

Windsor chairs made from mahogany are very rare and – like this one – often exhibit a sophistication and attention to detail design not usually found in their more “country” cousins.