The armchair corresponds to William Kent’s seat furniture of the mid 1730’s. With its distinctive features it relates closely to the set of armchairs probably made for the saloon at Devonshire House in 1733 – 34; four of the chairs remain at Chatsworth House while a fifth is in the Wallace Collection (coincidentally it was in a state of disrepair until recently the subject of a comprehensive conservation project). These chairs display prominent scallop shells to their X-frame supports and side aprons, with the additional feature of a mask to the centre of the seat rail. The Chatsworth armchairs have dished seats (Susan Weber, ed., William Kent Designing Georgian Britain, New Haven and London, 2014, pp. 479 – 80, fig. 18.15). Other related Kent chair patterns include armchairs and stools en-suite supplied in 1737 by the carver Henry Williams of Long Acre, London, for Hampton Court where they were documented in bills a chair and accompanying stool are now at Hatfield House, Herts (ibid, p. 480, fig. 18.16); and a pair of armchairs and twenty-four X-frame stools devised by Kent and also probably supplied by Williams for Windsor Castle in c. 1746 – 47 (ibid, p. 282, fig. 11.17).
William Kent (d.1748) was the Rome-trained artist, architect and illustrator and protégé of Richard Boyle, 3^rd Earl of Burlington. (d.1753). Kent was appointed Master Carpenter to George II’s Architectural Board of Works in 1726. Among his important furniture commissions in the 1730s were Houghton Hall, Norfolk; Wanstead House, Essex (the contents sold in 1823, the house demolished in 1825); Chiswick House for his mentor Lord Burlington and Devonshire House, London.