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Attributed to Gillows With scrolled backs in fluted frames with detached dolphin arm-supports, the tablet-centred friezes on sabre legs, with original webbing and batten carrying-holes, redecorated, the back legs with metal braces (2) PROVENANCE Almost certainly supplied to Beriah Botfield, Esq. (1768-1813) for Norton Hall, Daventry and by descent to his son Beriah Botfield, Esq. (1807-1863), Norton Hall and by whom bequeathed to the Thynne family. LITERATURE 1863 Norton Hall Inventory, possibly (presuming the others chairs in the suite were in another room) '6 walnut gilt Trafalgar Chairs seats stuffed & covered en suite 2 ditto with arms' 1919 Norton Hall Inventory, p. 5, Inner Hall, '2 Japanned rosewood and gilt scroll frame chairs seats and backs upholstered in green crimson and gold damask. 2 ditto ditto open arm chairs en suite with carved dolphins. 2 ditto ditto easy chairs en suite', p. 15, Drawing Room, 'A painted rosewood and carved gilt suite of furniture upholstered in damask comprising:- A scroll end settee with squab three back cushions and two bolsteres. 2 Open arm chairs with gilt dolphins. 'Easy chair with gilt dolphins. A Standard chair. A foot stool.' 1942 Norton Hall Inventory, Schedule C, Inner Hall, 'The gilt suite of the Trafalgar period, comprising:- two carved easy chairs with dolphin arms upholstered in damask, two arm chairs with open arms, four smaller arm chairs and six small chairs en suite', Drawing Room, 'Painted rosewood and carved gilt suite upholstered in damask and dolphin supports comprising - Scroll end settee, two easy chairs, six open arm chairs, eight standard chairs and footstool'. NOTES The drawing-room bergeres are likely to have been commissioned by Beriah Botfield Senior (1768-1813) shortly after his marriage in 1806. They are designed in the French antique style promoted around 1800 by George IV when Prince of Wales, and popularised in particular by the furniture drawing-master and author Thomas Sheraton (d. 1806). These hearth-side easy-chairs relate in particular to Sheraton's 'Herculanium' chair, published in The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803 (pl. 7), and they would have been designed to harmonise with fashionable 'Grecian sofas' that stood out on either side of the fireplace. Their frames are japanned in 'trompe l'oeil' black-figured rosewood with gold enrichments in the manner of a celebrated suite of seat-furniture, with bacchic British lion-monopodia arms, supplied for the City of London's Mansion House and invoiced in 1803 as 'japanned Black Rose Wood and rich burnished gold'. The Mansion House chairs featured 'anchor' backs and the anchor motif, together with Neptune's dolphins, appeared in Sheraton's patriotic chair pattern issued in 1806 and entitled a 'Nelson' chair ( The Cabinet-Maker, Upholsterer and General Artist's Encyclopaedia, 1806, plate 9 of chairs). The use of Neptune's dolphins provided appropriate 'poetic' ornament for a drawing-room. The chair's Grecian-scrolled backs evoke the lyre attribute of Apollo as poetry deity, while the arm-supports of embowed dolphins evoke the history of the Greek poet Arion. Arion, the cithera player of Lesbos was celebrated for his choral hymn to Dionysus, and also for the fable that some dolphins, charmed by his music, had borne him to land when he had been thrown into the sea from a boat. Triumphal palms, sacred to the poet, flower the seat-rail tablets of the chair-frames, which are sunk with 'antique' flutes. Sheraton had included a Grecian pattern for related bergeres, with dolphin arms and voluted cresting, as part of a 'Duchess' daybed or lecti tricliniorum in his Cabinet Dictionary, 1803 (pl. 17). Dolphin arms had also appeared at this period on a Drawing-Room suite executed by the chair-maker B. Harmer, and supplied by the court cabinet-makers William Marsh and Thomas Tatham of Mount Street, for Powderham Castle, the Devon seat of William, 3rd Viscount Courtenay, later 9th Earl of Devon (d. 1835). A pair of these bergeres was sold by Lord Courtenay, in these Rooms, 5 July 1990, lot 50. This pair of chairs, together with the previous lots (420, 421 and 422), was probably supplied by Gillows of London and Lancaster. Both Beriah Botfield Senior's brother Thomas, and his son's names appear in the Gillows archives.