The Aldby Park Suite. A Rare and Important Suite of Queen Anne Seat Furniture
£22,500
An exceptionally rare suite of Queen Anne period japanned and parcel-gilt seat furniture, originally from Aldby Park, Yorkshire, and probably supplied by the Royal chair makers Thomas and Richard Roberts.
The suite, comprising a wing armchair, two high-back chairs and two stools, displays the most fashionable advances in furniture design of the day, notably the use of cabriole leg, the double scroll of the arms to the wing chair, the rolled top to the cresting rail of the chairs and the sharp, fully raked back legs of the chairs, a feature that was first introduced around 1709.
Few intact suites of furniture of this type exist outside of museums and historic houses. Individual items of this type were only the preserve of the wealthy members of society, consequently, suites of five such pieces were only ever commissioned by patrons of considerable status and means, in this case, Thomas Darley, a member of the court of Queen Anne.
Dimensions:
Wing-back armchair 52 in. (H) x 31.5 in. (W) x 29 in. (D)
High-backed chair 46.5 in. (H) x 20.25 in. (W) x 23 in. (D)
Stool 19 in. (H) x 20.25 in. (W) x 15.75 in. (D)
Recently traditionally upholstered in Gainsborough silk damask with gold passementerie
Provenance:
Aldby Park, North Yorkshire, seat of the Darley family since 1550s. Almost certainly commissioned by Thomas Darley (born 1664)
Illustrated in situ at Aldby Park Country Life, November 9th 1935
thence by descent until sold circa 1950s to:
Phillips of Hitchin, est. 1884 based at The Manor House in Hitchin, one of the most important and influential antique dealers in the UK and sold many thousands of objects to many major national museums, both in the UK and internationally. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Manor House contained 80 rooms of antique furniture and other objects. The offered suite can be seen illustrated in The Tudor Hall of their premises
Exhibited at the Grosvenor House Antiques Fair circa 1963
Illustrated in Connoisseur magazine
Purchased from Phillips of Hitchin at Grosvenor House Fair by a Lady of Title, Private UK collection until 2024
Thomas Darley (born 1664)
Thomas Darley was Queen Anne’s Ambassador to the Levant, this position would almost certainly have brought him in to contact with the Royal Chair-maker to Queen Anne, Thomas Roberts, from whom he probably commissioned this suite. The bed which is now in the museum collection of Temple Newsam, Leeds, Yorkshire.
Darley is most famous for having bought an Arabian colt the Darley Arabian, one of three dominant foundation sires of modern Thoroughbred horse racing bloodstock.
On arrival in England the Arabian was taken to Aldby where from 1704 he stood for a fee. There is very little on the stallion in the notebooks of Henry Darley (brother of Thomas Darley), beyond the names of people, such as Mr. Childers, who sent mares and the dates of covering. Whistlejacket, one of the first foals sired by the Arabian to run, won at York in 1712 and was bought by Childers for £120. Childers then sent his best mare, Betty Leedes to Aldby. The second mating in 1714 produced Flying Childers, later bought by the Duke of Devonshire, on 28 September 1719 according to the entry in the Chatsworth records. The Arabian was painted by a local artist in 1709, the picture 9’4″ by 7’0″ still dominating the hall at Aldby Park, and showing the stallion exactly as Thomas Darley had described him. Late in his life the stallion went on loan to the Duke of Leeds in exchange for a pedigree bull, but returned to Aldby.
Thomas Roberts
‘The Royal Chair’, Marylebone Street, London (fl. 1685-1714)
Thomas Roberts was probably the son of the Clerk, Thomas Roberts of Staning, Gloucestershire, apprenticed to Richard Price for seven years, from 8 Jan 1677/8 and made free by servitude on 16 January 1686/7. He succeeded Richard Price as the chief supplier of bed frames, seat furniture and fire-screens to the Royal Household in 1686, and held this position throughout the reigns of James II, William and Mary, and Anne.
Roberts’ name has become almost synonymous with the elaborate walnut chairs and stools of the period, carved with ‘festoons and flowers’ or ‘mouldings and foldings’, as they are often described in the accounts. Their scrolling arms and stretchers, also referred to in the documents as ‘horsebone’, derive contemporary French designs. The gilded caryatid frames of the seat furniture in the Venetian Ambassador’s Room at Knole, supplied en suite with a state bed for James II only a few months before his flight and exile, may have been directly influenced by similar sets sent over from Paris by the carver and upholder Peyrard and the upholder Delobel towards the end of Charles II’s reign. Many references to ‘French tables’ and ‘French beds’ are found in his later bills of the 1690s. To judge by the vast amount of routine furniture which Roberts made for the use of ambassadors, court officials and military officers, as well as more elaborate items for the sovereigns themselves, he apparently had an enormous workshop.
Like his contemporary, the cabinet maker Gerrit Jensen, he is recorded as making models of proposed furniture for William III’s own use, for instance ‘two Pattern chairs and two stooles made to show the King’, and intended for Windsor Castle, in 1697. His bills for ‘saffaws’ or sofas made for Chatsworth, as well as for the royal palaces, are among the earliest recorded references to this form of furniture, and as well as carved and gilded pieces he could produce exotic finishes such as the ‘blue and white Japan’ frames for twelve round stools with caned seats sent to Hampton Court in 1693, at a cost of £52 15s.
Thomas Roberts’ premises at the sign of ‘The Royal Chair’, were in Marylebone Street, Westminster, as recorded in a policy taken out with the Sun Insurance Co. on 7 November 1713 and he was succeeded here by Richard Roberts, almost certainly his son, who also took over as carver and joiner to the Royal Household in 1714.
Richard Roberts
Marylebone St, London (fl. 1707-1733)
Richard Roberts was the son of Thomas Roberts, chair maker to the Great Wardrobe between 1685 and 1714, and his wife Jane, born on 27 January 1691/2 and baptised in St. Martin in the Field parish on 25 February 1691/2
In 1707 he was apprenticed to his father, who died in 1714 and on 20 March 1716 he was made free of the Joiner’s Company ‘on the report of Charles Reynier… and Richard Caloway… the said Thomas Roberts being dead’. It is assumed he then took over his father’s business at ‘The Royal Chair’ in Marylebone, at the same time, succeeding to his post as joiner and chair maker to the Great Wardrobe.
Roberts supplied seat furniture, bed frames, firescreens, and tables to the Royal Household from 1714 until 1729
A related chair of identical form (though without turned cross stretcher), previously in the collection of Sir William Lever, Bt., later 1st Viscount Leverhulme was sold Christies New York 30 Apr 2007 (illustrated)
We are grateful to Christopher Coles for his research
