A pair of armchairs with upholstered seat and back covered in green velvet, the frame of mahogany carved with an overall fish-scale pattern. English, about 1755-1760

Pair of armchairs of mahogany, the cabriole legs, serpentine seat rails and down-curved arm supports all carved with scale ornament, with a trail of husks down the outer corner of the front legs and a curved leaf at each toe. The rails are of beech. The seats and backs are fully upholstered in green velvet. The feet were originally fitted with recessed brass castors, now missing on one of the armchairs.

The chair frames are composed of continuous curving elements, typical of rococo designs. The scale ornament is traditionally connected with the dolphins that accompany the sea-shell chariot of the goddess Venus in Roman mythology. This fishy element is traditional, although dolphins are, of course mammals. This motif was a favourite motif of the designer Willliam Kent (1685-1748) and appears on furniture designed in the period 1720-1750. It was said that flowers sprang up wherever the feet of Venus touched the ground, and small carved flowers decorate the centre of the seat rails.

Bequeathed by C. D. Rotch

Part of a suite of 2 sofas and armchairs (possibly 24, possibly fewer) almost certainly supplied to George Brudenell, 4th Earl of Cardigan (1712-1790), who, in 1766 was created 1st Duke of Montagu of the second creation, for Ditton Park, Buckinghamshire (now Berkshire), almost certainly by John Gordon of Swallow Street, London (active 1748-1796).

The attribution to Gordon is based on a set of 8 identical plain chairs supplied in 1756-7 by Gordon to James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl (?1690-1764) for Blair Castle in Perthshire. The bill for these describes them as '8 Mahogany Chairs, Carv'd frames in fish scales, with a French foot & carv'd leaf upon the toe'. Those chairs cost £31.8s. 0d., i.e. just under £4 each, but the embroidered covers had been made by the Duchess. The ornament of fish scales or dolphin scales (although dolphins are not scaly) had been revived by Thomas Chippendale in his Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director, first published in 1754. They are associate with the Roman goddess Venus, whose sea-shell chariot was drawn by dolphins. For an account of these chairs see Anthony Coleridge, 'Chippendale, The Director, and some Cabinet-makers at Blair Castle', Connoisseur, December 1960, p. 252.

It is interesting that all the chairs supplied for Blair Castle are plain chairs, while the set from Ditton include only armchairs, plus two sofas.

No bill for the supply of the chairs and sofas to Ditton has been found.

Ditton Park was owned by the Dukes of Buccleuch in the late 18th and 19th centuries. A fire destroyed the house in 1812. According to J.P. Neale, Views of the Seats (1822), 'a considerable part of the furniture was saved' but in 1847 George Lipscombe noted that 'a great quantity of family plate, jewels and furniture, with many paintings and ornaments were burnt'. One of the sofas from this set was shown in a watercolour of the Library at Ditton Park, painted in about 1850 by Caroline Douglas, and now in a private collection (illustrated in black and white in the catalogue of the sale of the collection of Simon Sainsbury (The Creation of an English Arcadia), Christie's 18 June 2008, lot 60). Whether this had survived the fire or been acquired subsequently seems to be uncertain. The only 18th century inventory of Ditton Park is from 1709, which is too early to include this set.

A Probate Inventory of Ditton Park, made in 1884, after the death of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, lists the sofa from the suite in the Library. Large numbers of chairs are listed elsewhere in the house but the descriptions are too imprecise to allow for certain identification.

Ditton Park was sold to the Admiralty in 1917 but the chairs had clearly left the house before the First World War as the first image of one of the chairs offered for sale was published in 1910, when the suite was in the possessions of Mallett's of Bath. It was at this point that the original size of the suite as having 24 armchairs was noted, but there is no other evidence of this. The sofas and armchairs may have been sold as early as 1884, the date of the death of the 5th Duke (there was a sale of paintings in 1887).

In 1909-11 Herbert Cescinsky, in his publication English Furniture of the Eighteenth Century (p. 360) had illustrated one of the chairs, then in the possession of Messrs Mallett, London, and commented that it was 'one of the very finest examples of the work of the later Chippendale period in this country.'

The pair of chairs was bequeathed to the V&A in 1962 by Claude Rotch, a noted collector of English furniture (see Registered File 61/3157).

Two armchairs of the same pattern were sold by Christie's London 13 April 1989, lot 50. One of these was shown with covers of 18th-century tapestry (not embroidery as in the original Ditton set) and one with covers of modern damask. It was suggested that the tapestry-covered armchair had possibly come from the Ditton set but its earlier ownership in Perthshire (sold from Fornethy House by Christie's, London, 22 July 1954, lot 64) might suggest a relationship with the Blair Atholl set more likely. The number of the original 8 surviving at Blair Atholl needs to be checked. The damask-covered chair had been sold anonymously by Sotheby's, London, 18 April 1958, lot 64. Eight armchairs and and two sofas from the set were sold in the Walter P. Chrysler Jr Collection, part II, Parke Bernet Galleries New York, 6-7 May 1960, lots 520-525 (illustrated in Anthony Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture (London:Faber, 1968) fig. 88). Two armchairs are in the Noel Terry Collection at Fairfax House, York (P. Brown, The Noel Terry Collection of English Furniture and Clocks (York: 1987), no. 59). Two more were sold from the Hochschild Collection, Sotheby's 1 December 1978, lot 42. A further pair were sold by Sotheby's, 26 March 1976, lot 71.

These two armchairs, with their elegant curving frames and their fine carving in imitation of fish scales, are fine examples of London chair-making of the mid-18th century. They were made, as part of a set with two sofas and 24 armchairs, for Ditton Park, Surrey, in the mid-1750s for George Brudenell, 4th Earl of Cardigan (1712-1790), who was created Duke of Montagu of the second creation in 1766. There is no surviving bill for these chairs but they are almost identical to a smaller set that were made for James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl (?1696-1764), for Blair Castle in Perthshire by John Gordon, a cabinet-maker and upholster who worked in Swallow Street (close to Oxford Circus) in London between 1748 and 1796). He charged the Duke just under £4 for each chair, but the embroidered covers had been made by the Duchess.

W.61& A-1962