A mahogany tester bed, the headboard set with mouldings outlining a triumphal arch, with spandrels carved with leafy forms, the posts in the form of fluted columns with Composite capitals, above plain, moulded plinths. The coved interior to the tester is lined with light blue silk damask. The solid mahogany tester is carved with a narrow frieze of Vitruvian scrolls, with Greek key on the underside of the frieze. The coved interior to the tester is lined with light blue silk damask, now covered in deep green damask. At the centre of the foot end the tester shows a narrow, breakfront section, surmounted by a tall, carved cartouche, bearing a crest that may be that of the Barrington family.

A mahogany tester bed, the headboard showing mouldings outlining a triumphal arch, with spandrels carved with leafy forms. The footposts are in the form of fluted columns with Composite capitals, above plain, moulded plinths. The coved interior to the tester is lined with light blue silk damask. The solid mahogany tester is carved with a narrow frieze of Vitruvian scrolls, with Greek key on the underside of the frieze. This motif is also used as a frieze at the top of the plinths to the posts and continues along the top of the arched sections between the plinths. The cornice is surmounted at the centre of the foot end, above a short, break-front section, with a tall, carved cartouche, bearing a crest that may be that of a branch of the family of Barrington (see object history). The crest shows a capped male bust, bearded and facing left, with striped clothing below the head and what may be a friar's hood pushed back from the head to the right. The coved interior to the tester is lined with light blue silk damask, covered in 1995 with the current deep green silk damask.

The tester appears to lift off as a complete unit, fitting over dowels on the top of the posts. The base of the plinths below the posts are hollowed out to take castors.

Two mattresses accompanied the bed when it came to the Museum (a box spring mattress and a hair mattress were mentioned in correspondence at the time of acquisition in 1939) .

Sold to the Museum for £150 by Charles Angell, a dealer at 34 Milsom Street, Bath. RF 39/2761. According to the dealer, it had come to him from Captain Spicer of Spye Park, near Bowood, Chippenham (Captain Spicer may simply have rented this house for a time). His correspondence refers to 'two mattresses for the Mahogany Chippendale Bed' (a box spring and a hair mattress, as noted elsewhere) and to the cove being lined with modern chintz, but with sky-blue silk damask below. The chintz or 'cretonne' was removed before the bed came to the Museum but is visible in some old photographs on the Acquisition File. When the bed first came to the Museum, it was shown with the needlework counterpane T.287-1910.

The history of the bed is unknown, and it is complicated by the likelihood that it was made up later than its apparent date of about 1740. There is undoubtedly some relation to Barrington Hall, Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex, which had panelling similar to the woodwork of the bed, but the history of that house is itself immensely complicated. In 1996 the V&A Curator Frances Collard and the V&A Conservator Albert Neher, inspected the bed at Marble Hill. They noted that certain elements, notably the four posts and head board appeared to have come from another source. In 2010 the Furniture History Society made a visit to Marble Hill, led by the English Heritage Curator Treve Rosoman, who noted that there was no arrangement for hanging curtains, and suggested that the bed may have started out as parts of an organ case, and have been made up into its current form in the early twentieth century (Furniture History Society Newsletter no. 170, August 2010, p. 19). The Historic England listing of Barrington Hall states that 'some door surrounds and rococo plasterwork survive from this period [i.e. 18th century]' and a sales brochure for the Hall, produced in 2014 by Hamptons International shows these doorcases and a large overmantel in the Hall, all in mahogany and close in the style of carving to the bed. The overmantel has narrow, fluted columns with Corinthian capitals that can be compared with the Composite capitals on the bed. A further detailed examination of the bed will need to be undertaken when it is next dismantled to check the evidence of its having been made up from earlier woodwork and to try to determine when this was done. It was not usual for architectural woodwork to be carried out in mahogany, although there are precedents, as, for example, at Houghton Hall, Norfolk in the 1720s.

The crest certainly appears to relate to the Barrington family. The baronets Barrington (created 1611, extinct 1832), who owned Barrington Hall in the 17th century, were entitled to a crest of 'a capuchin friar, affrontée [looking forwards], ppr. [proper, i.e. in naturalistic colours], couped [cut off] below shoulders, vested [clothed], paly of six arg. and gu. [with six stripes of silver and red], on its head a cap, or [gold]'. In the carving, the head is in profile, looking left, so may be considered closer to The crest of the Viscounts Barrington and Barons Barrington (an Irish title, first created in 1720), which, as correctly described in armorial terms shows 'a capuchin friar, couped [cut off] at breast, black hair, vested [clothed], paly of six [six stripes - there are seven on the clothing here], argent and gules [silver and red], on its head a cap, or cowl, hanging behind of the last [red]'. This more or less equates to what is shown in the carving. The likelihood is, however, that the bed (or at least its constituent woodwork) was made for an untitled heir to the property, who took the name Barrington. In 1715, when the Sir Charles Barrington, 5th Baronet, died, he had no direct heirs, so left his property to his sister Anne, who had married the royal goldsmith Charles Shale (and thence to their son John Shale, who took the name of Barrington), and to a cousin John Shute Barrington (1678-1734), who was created 1st Viscount Barrington in 1720. The title passed in 1734 to a cousin, but minus the Essex property.

Much information on Barrington Hall came from the work of Lucy Wood in The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Gallery (London: Yale University Press, with National Museums Merseyside), 2008, vol. I, cat. no. 31, pp. 365-379, and the following is largely from her work. There she discusses six mahogany chairs, dating them to 1740-1750, giving them a possible attribution to the furniture maker William Hallett (1707-1781). It is notable that those chairs are carved on the seat rail with a Greek key band. She traced the provenance back to John Shales Barrington (c. 1710-1788), who inherited Barrington Hall in 1734 from John Shute Barrington, 1st Viscount Barrington. Although John Shute Barrington's main seat was at Beckett's, near Faringdon, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) he seems to have lived at Barrington Hall for at least some time because his name as the occupant is recorded by Daniel Defoe in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain in 1724 (Reprinted London: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 11). He recorded 'His Lordship is a Dissenter and seems to love retirement'. John Shales Barrington began to re-build the house soon after 1734. A drawing of an ambitious Palladian house is signed by Joseph Sanderson (d. 1747) (see John Harris, 'The Shoppee Album', Furniture History, vol. XXVI (1990), pp. 99-113, the elevation fig. 16). The house still contains fine rococo plasterwork attributed to the Anglo-Danish sculptor and plaster worker Charles Stanley(who left England in 1746). The house was, however, never completed (some say because John Shales Barrington was crossed in love) and remained unfinished and unoccupied for 128 years. In 1771 Peter Muilman in A New and Complete History of Essex... By a Gentleman (Chelmsford: Lionel Hassall) vol. IV, pp. 113-4 wrote that 'The chief of the furniture, which was equal in richness to the building, hath of late years been removed.' In 1863 it was completed and entirely re-modelled, for a distant relative of the Barringtons, by the architect Edward Browning, in Jacobean style.

It is possible, but far from certain, that this bed is the one catalogued in the sale of contents of Bradfield Hall, near Reading, Berkshire, sold by direction of Mrs Arthur Connop, on the premises, Robinson & Fisher, 4-7 July 1898, lot 191 (a copy of the catalogue is in the Courtauld Institute Library): 'Lot 191. A 5 ft. very fine OLD CHARLES CARVED OAK STATE BED-STEAD with finely fluted and exquisitely carved Corinthian columns, arched head-board with carved panels, dome canopy, the chintz furniture, and thick paillasse [sic]'. The two descriptors that do not fit the V&A bed are 'oak' (this bed is in mahogany) and 'Corinthian' (the capitals are Composite) but it is possible that either of those are a mistake of the auctioneers clerk in taking down details of the bed. If so, this bed would share the early provenance of the set of chairs catalogued by Lucy Wood, who discovered the sale catalogue and all of the provenance details. She established that the chairs passed from John Shale Barrington by bequest or gift to his friend Stephen Wilson (d.1814) of Bradfield Hall, thence by bequest to Wilson's goddaughter Katherine (née Stewart) (d. 1850), wife of the Rev. John Connop, and by descent to Mary Dixon Connop, widow of Woodham Arthur Connop, who sold them in 1898. According to a settlement made by Sir Charles Barrington, 5th Bart. (d. 1714) the estates passed, after the death of John Shales Barrington, to his third cousin, the 8th Bart, but all furnishings except items that could be considered fittings, could be left as John Shales Barrington wished.

It is difficult to suggest a date for the bed but it must surely have been made at some point between 1734 and 1814, as Stephen Wilson would have no particular interest in confecting a bed with such strong association to the Barrington family, if it came through that route. It is possible that the bed was made up from old woodwork at Barrington Hall after 1788, when the house returned to the Baronets Barrington. It is recorded that alterations to the house were made in 1792. It is unlikely that it could have been made at Barrington after 1832, when the house left the immediate family. See Lowndes, Alan G., ed., 'The History of the Barrington Family'. Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, Vol. II, N.S. 1884, pp. 3-54 (this moment discussed on pp. 51-2). Given the fact that the head of the friar in the crest faces left (rather than front), it is possible that the bed was made up in the 19th century for one of the Viscounts Barrington, perhaps after 1863, from woodwork rescued from Barrington Hall. The motivation may have been to commemorate their connection with the older baronetcy. The lack of provision for the hanging of curtains would be less puzzling if the date of its making were in the 1860s, when such drapery was beginning to be thought unhygienic.


The bed has been on loan to Marble Hill House, London, from 1968 RF 68/1020. The loan was initially managed through staff at Kenwood House. Before that the bed had been for some years at Osterley House, than managed by the V&A. After the bed went to Marble Hill new silk was commissioned for the covering of the dome and the cover, paid for by the GLC (Registered File 68/1020, letter from Cathy Power dated 23 April 1996). There seems to be now detailed correspondence on the question of removing and replacing the silk, but a Museum memo dated 21 May 1996 records that John Jacob (curator at Marble Hill) had written to Gainsborough Silk Weavers in October 1968 asking them to find a match for a silk sample from the bed, which was 'being repaired by arrangemen with the museum in our workshop'. In 1996 Cathy Powers also mentioned in letters two 'new' mattresses, and was concerned about their susceptibility to moth. These were presumably the 'new' mattresses mentioned by the dealer Mr Angell. They were fumigated, returned to the V&A and replaced with an inert foam matress of slightly greater depth.

In 1996 the English Heritage curator Cathy Power had discovered that the fragments of blue silk damask that survived on the bed were identical in pattern to that on George II's bed at Hampton Court. The bed was re-displayed with a rich, green silk damask and this was also used for a counterpane, but not curtains (because of the lack of provision for hanging these). The green was chosen because, in the 1767 inventory of Marble Hill, a four poster bed with green damask hangings was listed. A conservator's report was made at that time. It pointed out that there is no provision for hanging curtains within the cove of the tester. Small holes at the top of the posts may indicated where a bracket was attached for hanging curtain poles but this would be a make-shift arrangement, with no provision for valances to hide the poles. The report was undertaken by John Hartley of the Tankerdale workshops. He was unable to give a firm dating for the bed, thought that the woodwork looked authentically 18th-century, but questioned the lack of fixings for hanging curtains. He did however, make reference to a bed at Florence Court, noting the Irish tradition for mahogany beds with solid head boards. 'The headboard itself is not set into a rebate in the head posts, which is the usual form of fixing, but is scribed and cut to fit the shape of the posts and simply screwed through from the rear. The decoration of the headboard looks to be of a similar period to the tester and the posts, but the carving differs slightly in execution. The bed posts are joined at the top of the mattress rail which is structurally weak and unusual. I would expect the posts to continue to the floor. The base frame has an unusual form of bracket feet and stands on castors that appear to be nineteenth century, the bottom of the legs having been cut away rather crudely. The base does not have any accommodation for slats, but instead has the remains of a system for tensioning a canvas support cloth. There are some crude pine blocks attached to the inside of the legs that have been used to support laths for lower valances. These do not seem to have any great age, but may be replacements for similar earlier brackets. There are no bolts visible for holding the frame together, but a fixing system may become apparent when the top cover strips are removed from the mattress rails.
There are therefore four main elements to the bed, each of which could have originated from a different source and could have been put together to form a bed maybe at some time in the nineteenth century.'

This handsome mahogany bed carries the crest of the Barrington family of Barrington Hall, Broad Oaks, Essex. It may have been made for John Shales Barrington c. 1710-1788), who inherited the house in 1734 and immediately began an ambitious programme of re-building, working with the architect Joseph Sanderson (d. 1747). The style of the carving suggests this. The house was, however, never finished, and remained incomplete until it was substantially enlarged and re-modelled in 1863. The building still retains some rococo plasterwork and exceptionally fine architectural woodwork (doors, doorcases and overmantels) in carved mahogany, which are close in style to the carving on this bed. It is possible that the bed was made up in the late-18th century or the 19th century, from panelling originally made for the house.

W.36-1939