Armchair Cover thumbnail 1
Not currently on display at the V&A

Armchair Cover

1660-1680 (made)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

This leather chair-back cover is one of a set of six, two of which (including this one) are from armchairs. They are painted with figures, animals and plants that are unrelated to each other in either composition or scale. This treatment is very similar to the style of raised-work (or ‘stumpwork’) pictures embroidered by women at home in the 1660s–80s, often to cover the sides of a box or the frame of a mirror. So it seems very likely that these leather panels were also painted by a female amateur. She probably painted the covers first, and then passed them to an upholsterer to fix to the chairs. The chair-frames and the seat-covers (which would have suffered much more wear than the back-covers) clearly perished over the next three centuries. The fact that the painted back-covers were removed from the frames and preserved suggests that perhaps they were valued as the work of a talented ancestor. If so, this seems later to have been forgotten. When we acquired the covers in 2003 we were unable to discover anything about their former owners.


Object details

Categories
Object type
Materials and techniques
Painted leather
Brief description
Painted leather chair-back cover, with three figures, a dog and a snail, one of six, English 1660-1680
Physical description
A painted leather cover for an armchair-back, roughly square in shape, but with cut-outs in the sides, more than half-way down, to accommodate arm-rests. The edges – except along the middle section of the bottom – are folded over to the back and are marked with regularly spaced nail-holes, going through both layers (where the panel was formerly fixed to the front of a chair-frame with decorative nails). The domed nail-heads have left circular imprints on the front face of the leather, 1–1.1 cm. in diameter (with a few slightly larger), spaced 3–4 cm apart, centre to centre. On the bottom edge, only c. 8 cm at each end is treated in the same way (where the panel was fixed to the front face of the back uprights). In between, the leather is now laid flat, marked with plain nail-holes, irregularly spaced, along the very bottom edge (where it was originally nailed to the underside of the bottom rail of the chair-back). Above this edge, impressions of dome-headed nails run in line with those at either end.

This cover is one of a set of six, of which one other was also for an armchair, the other four for plain chairs.

This cover is painted with three standing figures, a man between two women, the right-hand woman holding a flower. Also depicted are a seated dog on the left, a snail (upper left), a giant tulip (upper right) and other flowers, all out of proportion to the human figures. At the bottom are two birds, one either side of a pond (with something unidentifiable in or on it).

The rows of nail holes and the folds in the leather indicate that the cover was folded in on itself and nailed to the front face of the chair-back with dome-headed spaced nails, except at the bottom, between the uprights, where it was turned over the bottom rail of the chair-back and fixed to its underside. So the dome-headed nails on the front face, along the bottom, were purely decorative. Around the other edges there are also some smaller plain nail-holes, each positioned immediately next to the hole of a decorative nail and within the diameter of its domed head. These holes may have been made in the course of stretching the cover to the frame, before the domed nails were fixed. However, their density follows no obvious rationale; in places they occur in several adjacent holes, and in other long stretches they are entirely lacking. So they may alternatively reflect a re-fixing of the cover, re-using some but not all of the original nail-holes.

Condition
The painting is dirty and rubbed. There is a tear in the upper right quarter, which has been stitched together. On the left side the top and inner edges surrounding the arm-rest have unfolded, and an unintended crease has been made in the flap below the arm-hole.
Dimensions
  • Height: 55cm
  • Width: 57.5cm
Object history
Bought from Gardiner Houlgate, Bath Auction Rooms, 9 Leafield Way, near Bath SN13 9SW, 13 November 2003, lot 800 (£2,587.75 for the set). According to the auctioneers, the chair covers 'were recently discovered in a mixed lot of textiles in a small auction and subsequently brought into our Corsham salerooms for evaluation and inclusion in sale'.


A set of 7 early 18th-century chairs upholstered in gilt leather with polychrome decoration, in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (see Lucy Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery. New Haven and London, 2008, vol.I pp. 180-93, gives the effect that these covers might have created on their original chairs. Recent work, however, on the firm of Ince and Mayhew, shows that the chairs were only upholstered in this manner in 1780-1783 for Sir Cecil Bisshopp, of Parham House, Sussex, probably as a deliberate antiquarian exercise, using leather from an earlier screen ((see Hugh Roberts and Charles Cator, Industry and Ingenuity. The Partnership of William Ince and John Mayhew. London: Philip Wilson, 2022, p. 150, plate 285 and p. 200. Other instances of the use of such leather are not recorded.
Historical context
This is one of a set of six chair-back covers (W.26--31-2003; two for chairs with arms), painted with figures and animals in compositions reminiscent of late 17th-century 'raised' needlework (sometimes called stumpwork), with which they also share the out-of-scale relationship between the figures, large mammals and insects. This resemblance suggests that the painting may be amateur work. If so, the covers represent the only known instance of painted leather as a domestic accomplishment. The appearance of the folded edges suggests that the covers were painted before being fixed to the frames: that is, they were painted by design for their chairs (and then passed to an upholsterer for fixing), rather than being painted on the chairs, as an afterthought.

The fact that the covers have been preserved, even though the chair-frames themselves perished (presumably), suggests that they were treasured by their subsequent owners, perhaps because of a family tradition as to who had painted them. The seat covers, which would have been much more dirtied and abraded in use, were presumably discarded with the frames themselves.
Subjects depicted
Summary
This leather chair-back cover is one of a set of six, two of which (including this one) are from armchairs. They are painted with figures, animals and plants that are unrelated to each other in either composition or scale. This treatment is very similar to the style of raised-work (or ‘stumpwork’) pictures embroidered by women at home in the 1660s–80s, often to cover the sides of a box or the frame of a mirror. So it seems very likely that these leather panels were also painted by a female amateur. She probably painted the covers first, and then passed them to an upholsterer to fix to the chairs. The chair-frames and the seat-covers (which would have suffered much more wear than the back-covers) clearly perished over the next three centuries. The fact that the painted back-covers were removed from the frames and preserved suggests that perhaps they were valued as the work of a talented ancestor. If so, this seems later to have been forgotten. When we acquired the covers in 2003 we were unable to discover anything about their former owners.
Associated objects
Collection
Accession number
W.31-2003

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Record createdJune 8, 2004
Record URL
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