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These six matching chairs, one of which retains fragments of the trade label belonging to Giles Grendey’s workshop, are a stylish urban version of the traditional ladder-back chair. Discovered in a church in Essex in 1974, the chairs only recently came onto the market. They are beautifully made and the elegant curves of the back clearly align them with the fashionable furniture of the day. The chairs do lack their original seats, but the seat rails bear slight indentations that indicate that the chairs were most likely to have been made with rush seats - the usual style of seat for a traditional ladder-back.
The labelled chair (above) was previously on loan to the V&A and has been given a modern rush seat to show how this would have looked, once again pointing to the link between high style and traditional form that makes these chairs particularly interesting. The rush seats of fashionable chairs have largely disappeared, usually replaced by upholstered drop-in seats. However, in inventories of the period suites of rush-seated or ‘matted’ chairs appear frequently in smart parlours owned by the middling classes.
The chairs are a notable addition to the museum’s collection of labelled furniture: a table also bearing the remains of a Grendey label, was acquired by the Museum in 2007. These pieces are significant as the vast majority of surviving eighteenth-century furniture is unlabelled and the businesses that supplied them unknown. Giles Grendey was one of the leading figures of the London furniture industry. In 1740 he was described as ‘a great Dealer in the Cabinet Way’ and in 1755 as ‘an eminent Timber Merchant’. He also diversified into property and retired to Palmers Green, a ‘gentleman’. The labelled chair also bears a stamp “T. C.” possibly the initials of the craftsman who made the chair frame, though the individual is yet to be identified.
The chairs and table were purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund, the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the Geffrye Museum.
Two paintings were recently acquired by the museum from the sale of the Sir David and Lady Scott Collection at Sotheby’s.
The first, showing a woman and baby at a piano, is of about 1860, and is probably by Charles West Cope, a prominent artist who painted several sympathetic studies of mothers with their children. The painting uses a classical triangular composition that recalls religious paintings of the Madonna and child, reinforcing the importance of the relationship as the mother instructs and encourages her small child to play the piano. The portrayal of domesticity and motherhood is a key element of Victorian genre painting and the central image of the piano and its themes of nurture and instruction clearly communicate the middle-class values of its time.
This positive reinforcement of middle class taste by a prize winning artist is in contrast to the circumstances of the second painting - a small oil on canvas by A. Erwood, an artist of whom very little is known, not even their gender. They were recorded as exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1860 and 1869 and this painting, which is called The First Place, was shown in 1860. It is one of several works by the artist that explores loneliness and separation and shows the sadness of a maid in her first position away from home.
The artist lived in South London and it is possible that the painting captures a middle-class interior of that area. The painting is most notable for the wealth of information it provides about furnishings and decorating details and the way in which different items, colours and patterns could be combined. The furnishings are accurately drawn - the fanciful-looking curtain pole ends, for example, can be found in a trade catalogue of the period. It is very unusual to see so much furnishing detail in a painting of an ordinary Victorian middle-class interior, making this modest painting, with the insight it gives into mainstream middle-class taste, quite exceptional. The painting offers us a contrasting narrative on the theme of servants at this period to an existing piece in the museum's collection, Maids of All Work by J Finnie, 1864-5 (online in Search the Collections).Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund and the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund.
