The backs to the present chairs recall a standard Chippendale design; there were 'eight different designs of French Elbow Chairs, of various patterns' some of which possessed padded cartouche-shaped backs, in the first edition of the Director (1754), plates XVII-XX, and these successful chair designs were reissued in the third edition (1762). Backs of a similar shape appear in execution on the set of chairs supplied to Lady Harewood’s Dressing Room at Harewood House circa 1770-1772, sold Christie's, London, 9 October 2024, lot 12.
By the time of the present chairs, however, the Rococo ornament of these earlier designs had been superseded by the fashion for the 'Antique', as evidenced not only by the stiff-leaf headed turned front legs, but also by the paterae to the blocks at their heads. The patera motif, in this form, is its purest—the plain molded circle centering a ‘bublous indentation’ originated in classical Greece and Rome as a bronze implement of religious sacrifice, before entering the vocabulary of Classical architecture. It was revived in Renaissance Italy by both Palladio and Vignola, who employed it as an ornament of metopes in their delineations of the Classical orders, and its presence in eighteenth-century English architecture is epitomized by Sir William Chambers’ 1759 Treatise on Civil Architecture, pl. M, where he similarly treats it as a key to the Doric order. In English furniture, Chambers' alternating paterae and triglyphs are echoed on the fluted and roundel-carved front rails to two suites of hall chairs supplied by Ince and Mayhew to Viscount Palmerston and probably to Viscount Midleton, circa 1774-1775, see H. Roberts and C. Cator, Industry and Ingenuity: The Partnership of William Ince and John Mayhew, London and Dublin, 2022, pp. 133, 253 and 355, figs. 195-198. Roundel-headed legs also appear in Chippendale's oeuvre, in examples supplied to Paxton, Berwickshire; related molded paterae also appear on a gentleman's secretaire, circa 1775, formerly at Paxton (illustrated C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1987, vol. II, figs. 90 and 91).