English c1660, walnut with tentstitch cover, c1650

The chair frame
Turned walnut with rectangular back panel. The legs, the five stretchers and the lower portions of the uprights are decorated with barley-sugar spiralling.

The embroidery
Tent-stitch embroidery on a linen canvas ground, with raspberry stems with fruit and leaves, principally in red and green, on a dark blueish-green ground. With a scalloped fringe held with brass-headed nails.

The upholstery
The cover reattached to the frame over horsehair stuffing, canvas basecloth with a broken twill weave with stripes is presumed to be original, with no webbing. Photographs (1973) of the stripped chair frame show fairly clean frames, without generations of tack holes. The back cover appears to have been designed for a larger chair of similar pattern. The fringe thought to be contemporary with the covers.

Bought for £75 from Mssrs Camerons, Meronac (London) Ltd, Mount Street, W1. See RP 4648/37
One of a set of five 'Cromwellian chairs in English needlework from Denham' including one armchair.

Stated by the vendors to have been formerly at Denham Place, Bucks (built about 1696 by Roger Hill II.)
For the arms see Annual Review, 1937, pp.61-62 and R.P. 367/1938.

The back is blazoned with the arms of Hill of Spaxton Yaire and Pounsford, Co. Somerset (gules a chevron ermine between three garbs or) impaling Gurdon of Assington Hall, Co. Suffolk, and Letton, Co. Norfolk (sable three leopards faces jessant-de-lis or) for the marriage on 3rd August 1641 of Roger Hill I (d. 29th June 1655), eldest son of William Hill of Pounsford by his wife Jane (Young of Collunton), who "aet 17 1623 became serjeant-at-law in 1655, one of the barons of the exchequer, and a. great man in the Rump Parliament and in Oliver's time" to his second wife Abigail (d. 31st December 1658), 3rd daughter and fifth child by a second marriage of Brampton Gurdon, Coquize (d. 1649) of Assington and the Inner Temple. Denham Place was built about 1696 by Roger Hill II (b. 19th January 1642/3, d. 29th December 1729) who was knighted on 18th July 1668 and moving from Pounsford, became in 1673 High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire.

Notes taken from the RF (2016, transcribed by LM)
The chair was acquired on account of its textile, believed to predate 1650, (as recommended by curators Nevinson and Tatershall) not the wooden frame, examples of which were already in the museum.
Memo from textile curator to director: 'The embroidery on this chair is, I consider, not only attractive, but also of considerable importance to us as we have nothing closely resembling it and indeed very little in the way of embroidery from the coverings of its period. With regard to its exact date I feel there is some doubt. Considered by itself, without the evidence of the chair I should certainly have suggested it was worked before the middle of the 17th century century... [but dating is complicated by the lack of comparable pieces]

Mssrs Camerons, Meronac wrote to Ralph Edwards saying that they were willing to accept the museum's offer, though this meant selling at a loss, because the museum's purchase would improve the saleability of the other chairs in the set.

Nevinson (Textiles dept) requested that the chair be cleaned but not stripped.
Mr S.C. Kaines Smith of the Birmingham museum (V&A Advisory Council Member) advised the V&A in 1938 that the arms in the tent stitch upholstery are those of Hill of Denham Place, Bucks and Pounsford (Burke: Commoners, iv. 677), Bridgewater and Taunton, Somerset.

The covers removed for conservation 1973.

Other chairs from the same set
Three other side chairs and one armchair were sold by the dealer H.W.Keil Ltd. in 1968 to a private collector (USA). By 1996 they were at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

W.124-1937