This elegant armchair, with its delicately pierced back, is part of a set, originally of eight armchairs, of which six remain at Firle Place, East Sussex, the seat of the Gage family. The distinctive feature of the thistle in the back could point to a Scottish origin, although there are no clear links in the Gage family to Scotland and it is not known when the set of eight entered the collection at Firle.
With its arched crest and Chinese-railed back with central medallion, the chair relates to a pattern in Robert Manwaring's The Chair-Maker's Friend, 1765 (reproduced in A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture, New York, 1968, fig. 133). Two other closely related suites are recorded; one, including a set of six armchairs supplied to Sir Monnoux Cope, 7th Bart of Hanwell and Bramshill (d. 1763) for the Chapel Room at Bramshill, Hampshire (of which a pair was sold from the Metropolitan Museum, Christie’s, New York, 27 October 2015, lot 19, $106, 250); and a suite with griffin crest was formerly at Treworgey Manor, Somerset from the family of Nicholas Connock (d. 1757) four chairs from this suite are in the collections at Temple Newsam House, Leeds (illustrated in C. Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall, Leeds, 1978, vol. 1, no. 69; and vol. III, 1998, p. 721), while two further pairs were sold from an American private collection, Sotheby's, New York, 16-17 April 1998, lots 804-805.