NANCY LANCASTER AND HASELEY COURT
These eye-catching and whimsical chairs were formerly in the collection of Nancy Lancaster (1897-1994), at Haseley Court in Oxfordshire, known for its ‘Gothick Room’. Born in Virginia, Lancaster came to exert a tremendous influence on interior decoration in the twentieth century, due in part to her work with John Fowler, whose decorating firm, Colefax & Fowler, she purchased in 1944 from Sibyl, Lady Colefax. The influential British firm codified what is known as the ‘English country house look’ and gained renown for ‘making the English country house comfortable’. Lancaster’s famous contributions include Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire, her first major house in England which became her own residence with her husband, Ronald Tree, and later Ditchley Park, where she entertained such guests as Winston Churchill, Noel Coward and David Niven.
The quintessential English country house, Haseley sits perfectly in its landscape at the end of a tree-lined avenue surrounded by exquisite gardens. The principal front dates from the early eighteenth century, but this belies the earlier origins of the house as evidenced by the mullioned medieval wing projecting behind. As with so many houses, Haseley suffered greatly during the upheaval of The Second World War but was rescued by Lancaster, who set about restoring it and its and grounds from 1954. At Haseley Court, the Gothick Room was originally decorated as a bedroom for Visountess Astor, Lancaster’s aunt and the first woman to serve as a member of Parliament (see J. Cornforth, The Inspiration of the Past, London, 1985, p. 128). In photographs of the room, the chairs visibly complement the arcaded moldings of the walls and the pointed niche above the bed.

DAVID K.E. BRUCE AND EVANGELINE BELL BRUCE
David K. E. Bruce (1898-1977) was a distinguished career diplomat, the only American to have served as ambassador to France, Germany, Great Britain, and NATO. He was first married to Ailsa Mellon, daughter of financier Andrew Mellon, but met his second wife, Evangeline Bell (1914-1995), while working in London for the OSS during the Second World War. The daughter of a diplomat herself, Evangeline possessed remarkable intelligence—she spoke more than five languages—along with wit and beauty, which made her a legendary political hostess and style icon in Washington and abroad. The couple married in 1945.

Following Bruce’s tenure as Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, which ended in 1969, the Bruces decided to maintain a residence in London, acquiring a set at Albany—the elegant 18th-century townhouse on Piccadilly designed by Sir William Chambers for Viscount Melbourne and converted into flats in 1802. A native Virginian, David Bruce was a longtime friend of Nancy Lancaster, who introduced him to John Fowler. Fowler worked with the Bruces on the decoration of Wingfield House, the official London residence of the U.S. Ambassador in Regent’s Park, and later on their Federal-period townhouse in Georgetown, where these armchairs were placed in the Drawing Room (see: V. Lawford, 1978, pp.144-145).

The chairs were eventually moved to Staunton Hill, the Bruce family estate in Charlotte County, Virginia. Built in 1848 by Bruce’s forebears, the grand American Gothic Revival mansion would have harmonized beautifully with the armchairs’ playful antiquarian design.

THE FASHION FOR ‘GOTHICK’
With their flamboyant ogee-arched cresting, pierced quatrefoils and backs carved as window tracery, the chairs evoke ecclesiastical gothic architectural forms adapted to furniture in a manner greatly in fashion at the middle of the eighteenth century. Although the Georgian ‘gothick’ taste in furniture is most famously associated with designs in Thomas Chippendale’s Director and the taste of Horace Walpole, antiquarian and collector, as expressed in the domestic architecture of Strawberry Hill, his ‘little gothic castle’ in Twickenham, neither was the first to apply gothic forms to English interiors. Their predecessors, such as William Kent at Esher Place, and Batty Langley in his Ancient Architecture Restored (published in 1742 and reissued in 1747 as Gothic Architecture, improved by Rules and Proportions), had demonstrated its possibilities, though Walpole, unfairly but in typical fashion, dismissed their work as 'largely confined to garden accessories’ (W.S. Lewis, 'Horace Walpole, Collector’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series, vol. 92, 1980, p. 47).

In comparison with the more intense, historical-revivalist gothic taste of nineteenth-century England, Georgian interest in gothic forms combined elements of the French picturesque with antiquarian English gothic prototypes to create a more playful and light-hearted fusion of old and new, which the public was eager to adopt. From around 1750 onward, Chippendale and other cabinet-makers were producing a plethora of Gothic furniture to meet fashionable demand (in some examples this might be the inclusion of simple Gothic blind-fret panels on a plain rectangular form), and pattern books promoted the taste through 1760s, including, notably, the London Society of Upholders' Genteel Household Furniture in the Present Taste in 1760 (pl. 15) and The Cabinet and Chair-Maker's Real friend and Companion, 1765 (pl. 15) by the Haymarket cabinet-maker, Robert Manwaring.