A black and terracotta colour painted and stained chair with a deeply curved horizontal back with a terracotta painted figurative frieze on the front.The front and back legs are raked and canted. This form of chair is based on the Greek antique 'klismos' chair .

Summary Description
A black and terracotta colour painted and stained chair with a deeply curved horizontal back with a terracotta painted figurative frieze on the front.The front and back legs are raked and canted. This form of chair is based on the Greek antique 'klismos' chair .

Decorative scheme:
The chair back is painted with a figurative frieze in a terracotta colour on a black ground, contained in a horizontal terracotta stringing line forming a tablet in the manner of Greek red figure vase painting. The scene is taken from Greek mythology and shows a row of figures, representing King Eurytheus' command to Hercules to pluck the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. The King is shown seated on the right and Hercules to the left with spearmen at either end. At each end of the curved back is an elliptical wreath of laurel leaves with berries within a square frame broken by an anthemion motif at each corner. The back is painted in a plain black.
The seat rail is painted with vine leaves in black on a terracotta band outlined with black lines. The back of the seat rail is painted with two terracotta rectangles.The front legs are painted with ivy leaves and berries in terracotta on a black ground. The outer face of the back legs are similarly treated. The inside faces of the legs have a single vertical terracotta line down the middle. The backs of the legs are plain.

Construction
The curved back is of brick built construction. It is made up of six layers of bricks/blocks butted together and possibly glued. These appear to have been cut from solid blocks and are approximately 14" in length and vary between 1 to 1.5 inches in height. Where the glue has dried out the shape of the block is clearly visible.The blocks gradually taper towards the top. The splat, of a coarser grained wood, is tenoned down into the back of the seat rail and wedged. Four wooden pegs go through the back seat rail through the tenon. The splat is cut in an L shape to accommodate the curved back. It is made up of six vertical panels glued together. The splits along the glue lines of the splat extend through the tenon and are visible underneath. The centre panel has a particularly wide split where the glue has dried out. Eight plugged screws are visible on the back of the splat. The top three slightly protrude at the curved front but do not damage the painted surface.
The seat rail tenons into the front and back legs. The mortice of the (proper right) back leg has an old split which has been repaired with two repair nails.The legs have been slightly irregularly shaped to sabre form. There is evidence of screws in the (proper left) front leg which indicates that the legs have been made from two pieces of wood.

Upholstery:
This chair was covered with black horsehair when it arrived in the Museum in 1958. This was removed in 2011 and re-uphplstered in green wool (Veraseta Satin Athena Colour 6142) .The seat has always been upholstered with fixed upholstery. It was never caned as is often the case with chairs of this form which usually have a loose cushion on top of the caned seat. The beech frame is full of holes - both from nailing and from worm. The webbing and base cloth appear to have been re-stretched at some stage. The seat pad has a square stitched edge and also appears to have been removed and re-applied at some time in the past. Some tacks remain from the original upholstery and green wool threads have been caught in the tacks.

Bequeathed by Edith Beatty to Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, by whom given to the Museum in her memory

The design of this chair relates to a drawing of about 1785 made by the Parisian architect Jean-Jacques Montholon (1757-1826) for the Hôtel Montholon in the rue de la Poissonière, Paris, for the wife of Nicolas Montholon, President of the Parliament of Normandy. The design was published by Kathryn Norberg, 'Goddesses of Taste: Courtesans and their Furniture in Late-Eighteenth Century Paris', in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century. ed. Dana Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, New York and London: Routledge, 2007,pp. 77-114, illustrated as figure 6.4. The drawing shows the chair in profile, with the same widely curved legs and the single panel forming the back and sides of the chair. The legs, however, on that chair, curve backwards and forward, rather than to the side of the chair. That chair appears to have a solid seat supporting a cushion, as on the V&A chair W.2-1988, which is closer to it in form. The furntiure for the Hôtel Montholon was supplied by the Parisian cabinet maker George Jacob (1739-1814), who was cabinet maker to Queen Marie Antoinette. That furniture was made in mahogany, again closer to W.2-1988.

The wide curving back and shaped legs show that this is a klismos chair. The word klismos, meaning to lie or to rest, is Greek in origin and the sources for the design were the seats shown on Greek Classical vases or carved stone reliefs. Furniture in the Greek Revival style was very fashionable and klismos chairs were designed and made throughout Europe from the 1760s until the 1840s.

Klismos chairs were often painted in black and terracotta, like this chair, with friezes and other decoration inspired by Greek vases. The frieze on the back of this chair shows the gathering of the apples in the Garden of the Hesperides and was probably copied from an illustration of a vase in the British Museum which belonged to the diplomat and collector, Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803). His famous collection was first published in the 1760s. The anthemion scrolls below the frieze and the leaf patterns along the front of the seat and down the legs are typical of nineteenth-century furniture based on Greek Classical sources.

W.21:1, 2-1958