A Stool and Bench, 20th century

This present lot is directly after a design for a stool commissioned by King George IV as part of his aggrandizement of Windsor Castle in the mid-1820s. Much of the re-decoration was done in a romantic medieval style appropriate to the British Monarchy's ancient and chivalric history. The furnishing contract as 'Upholsterer in Ordinary to the King' had been granted in 1826 to Nicholas Morel, who went into partnership with George Seddon of Aldersgate Street, and took into his employ the highly talented fifteen year-old Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. In June of 1927, records indicate Pugin as designing 'working drawings for the gothic furniture' at Windsor, principally the Tudor-paneled New Corridor that served as a long picture gallery and which was designed by the King's architect Sir Jeffry Wyattville (d.1840). The stool frame is conceived in Morel and Pugin's 'Florid Gothic' style, with its frieze sunk with cusp-arched tablets and flowered with Tudor roses in quatrefoiled corner tablets, while the arch-pilastered legs are buttressed in pointed arches with fruit and foliage-enriched brackets.
A second stool from the set is at Temple Newsam House (Gilbert, loc. cit.) whilst a third was sold by the late Lady Anne Salmon, Phillips London, 12 February 1991, lot 146. A further stool, with later decoration, was sold anonymously at Christie's New York, 17 October 1987, lot 56.

For related examples:
P. Atterbury, C. Wainwright, Pugin A Gothic Passion, London, 1994, p.27, fig. 54.
H. Roberts, For the King's Pleasure, London, 2001, p. 253, fig. 302.