Pair of Antique Chinese Brighton Pavilion Bamboo Armchairs
£2,500
A rare pair of Chinese bamboo chairs in the Brighton Pavilion style with latticework backs over boarded seats raised on cluster legs with peripheral stretchers. With deep red lacquer over the bamboo which has achieved a wonderful patina over the years.
Bamboo furniture became highly fashionable in the West and particularly in England after the completion of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, created by architect Henry Holland around 1801 for George, Prince of Wales, future King George IV. The vogue for Chinese design and bamboo furniture developed in England following the publication of William Chambers’ ‘Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils’ in 1757. Chambers travelled to China three times in the 1740s with the Swedish East India Company and produced the volume, the first in Europe to methodically study Chinese architecture, gardens, clothes, machines, furniture and domestic objects. The form of these chair is comparable to furniture illustrated in William Chambers’ book.
Chairs of the same basic model were part of the exotic furnishings at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, which may have been purchased by John Crace from an East India Company merchant around 1802.
Similar chairs dating from the first quarter of the nineteenth century can be found in the Chinese Room at Claydon House, Buckingham, which was constructed in 1769.
The fashion for the ‘exotic’ can be seen in various parts of Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most notably for The Chinese Pavilion at Drottningholm in Sweden. Built between 1753 and 1769, it was a prefabricated building transported on rafts from where it was built at Arsenalsgatan as a surprise for the Lovisa Ulrika’s birthday on 24 July 1753.
