An armchair of rosewood, with a drop-in seat of stamped leather. The chair has front legs of cabriole form, the four legs joined by and x-form stretcher. The back shows a solid, vase-shaped splat.

An armchair in carved rosewood, with a drop-in seat of stamped leather, a pair to FE.49&A-1981. The armchair has cabriole front legs, with ball-and-claw feet, joined to the rectangular-sectioned back legs by a curving x-form stretcher, with a half-lap joint at the centre, the top carved with a floral rosette. The knee of each front leg is carved with an acanthus leaf. The thick seat rail is carved in the centre of the serpentine front rail with a shell and acanthus. The arms are out-curving and scrolled at the ends, supported on S-shaped arm supports that rise only slightly behind the front legs. The back, which is serpentine in section, has a solid, central splat of urn form. The top rail is carved with a large shell motif, flanked by openwork scrolling. The drop-in seat is covered with stamped leather, in a pattern of scrolling foliage.
Construction
The side seat rails are tenoned through the back uprights and are double-pegged at the sides. The back rail is tenoned into the uprights and double-pegged at the back. In both cases the pegs are very close to the edge of the member, giving poor support to the joint. There is no separate 'shoe' (lower support section for the splat, which that normally sits above the back rail. Instead, the shoe is carved in one piece with the back rail of the seat. The splat is tenoned between the shoe and the top rail, with single pegs to the joints. The seat frame is in four sections, meeting at mitred joints at the front, the front legs dowelled up through this joint, close to the front of the chair. Blocks of hardwood, with a rounded outer edge following the inside edge of the seat rail, and with a rounded outer edge, are glued in to support the corners of the seat frame. The exact form of the joint and its fixings is not possible to determine but it is possibly a lap-joint.
The timber has been tentatively identified as Dalbergia hemsleyi, a rosewood from Burma (see history). It is likely that the timber has been stained and grained to enrich its appearance. The timber is significantly lighter on the upper surface of the arm, where rubbing may have worn through any surface treatment.
The seat frame is of softwood, the four rails lapped. There is evidence of some worm damage. The stamped leather panel is nailed to the outer edges of the frame. The seat is very slightly padded under the leather.

Presented by the Monument Trust

Presented by the Monument Trust (See Registered File81/2205, on Nominal File MA/1/M2571), together with its pair, FE50-1981.
In July 1981 this pair of chairs were with the dealers Spink & Son Ltd, King Street, London. At that time they were described as being Chinese, of about 1730, made in the Portuguese style. The seats were known to the later (19th century). The Museum was interested in acquiring them because it lacked good examples of Chinese export furniture in hardwood, although it held a number of export lacquer pieces. They were offered to the Museum for £2800, including a price reduction by Spink. The Monument Trust funded this acquisition (see Nominal File MA/1/M2571), through the Associates of the Victoria and Albert Museum. By the time of acquisition, the date of the chairs was noted as 1740-1760, and they were thought to come from Canton.
In 1981 Jo Darrah of the Museum’s Scientific Section identified the wood as Dalbergia nigra or Brazilian rosewood. The laboratories at Kew suggested that it might equally be Dalbergia hemsleyi, which came from Burma, but said that it was not an exact match for either. They also believed that it might be a further species, for which they had no comparative material, or, indeed, a hybrid. According to the curator J.G. Ayres, the Portuguese were already by the 18th century importing rosewood from South America into Macao, so the identification of the wood cannot be used to determine the origin of the chairs.
Spink’s invoice for the chairs describes them as of ‘jacaranda wood’, a popular name in Portugal for varieties of rosewood. The term may well have become popular in Britain in the 19th century because it allowed importers to avoid the high custom duties imposed on rosewood. They noted that they had acquired the chairs in Paris, with the unsupported history that they had been made for the Viceroy of Macao in about 1740.
At the time of acquisition it was noted ‘Old repair to top of rail, otherwise good’.

The chairs are now considered to be of Portuguese make, dating from about 1860-1900. They were transferred to the Furniture and Woodwork Department in 1992 (see Registered File 92/1857). They probably came from a set of at least 8 chairs, as this chair carries the chisel marks numbering it as 7.

A possible prototype for these chairs, in walnut, is illustrated in the catalogue Artes Decorativas Portuguesas no Museo Nacional de Arte Antiga: Seculaos XV-XVIII (Lisbon, 1979), pl. 39. That chair was provenanced to the Convento de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, Tentugal, and dated to the middle of the 18th century.

This chair and its pair (FE.49-1981) were purchased as examples of Chinese chairs made for the Portuguese market in the 1740s. More recent work on the chairs has brought us to the conclusion that they were made in Portugal, at some time between 1860 and 1900, in the style of the 1740s. At that time, 18th-century furniture was widely appreciated and frequently copied for fashionable interiors. It had always been acknowledged that the leather on the seats was of 19th-century date, and other aspects of the chairs (including the fact that the stretchers have remained unbroken) are further evidence of its likely later date. The rosewood (which has proved difficult to identify to an exact species) has almost certainly been enhanced by staining and graining.

FE.50&A-1981