Each of this pair of “Roman” spoon back slipper chairs has an arched, pierced back, a cushioned seat upholstered in lemon raw silk, and sabre legs terminating in gilt ball feet.
Spoonback chairs appeared first in France, and then in England by the 1790s. The saber legs became a feature of these chairs in the first decade of the 19th century.
The design for these chairs appears in Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture (1807), plate XXVI, number 5. Similar chairs were also depicted in a watercolor found in the Flemish Gallery of Thomas Hope’s London mansion on Duchess Street.
Provenance: a private collector in County Tipperary, Ireland.
Ireland, circa 1810.