The Chesterfield House armchairs
A rare pair of George III period carved and giltwood armchairs
Provenance: Viscount Lascelles and Princess Mary Viscountess Lascelles, daughter of King George V and Queen
Mary,
Chesterfield House, London
Attributed to François Hervé
English, circa 1780
£38,000
Provenance:
The arched backs bordered by a moulding of running waterleaf with a guilloche capping flanked by finials; the open
padded arms similarly carved sweeping down to urn shaped supports with spiral fluting above fluted legs with
Prince of Wales feathers and applied paterae
Height: 37 ½ in (95cm)
Width: 26 in (66cm)
Depth: 21 ½ in (55cm)
Provenance:
Viscount Lascelles and Princess Mary Viscountess Lascelles, daughter of King George V and Queen Mary,
Chesterfield House, London
Chesterfield House was one of the most splendid and magnificent mid-eighteenth-century houses in London, built
by one of the most fascinating men of his time, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, a politician and diplomat, wit and letterwriter. His house stood on an unusually large plot and was the first large house to face the park. Its front extended
almost from Audley Square to Curzon Street.
Chesterfield House has always been tantalisingly famous for its rooms in the French taste, designed by Isaac Ware,
who in his Complete Body of Architecture, published in 1756 at the start of the Seven Years War, professed a
strong apathy to things French. It was arguably the finest Great House completed in London in the 1740s.
Lord Chesterfield’s descendants continued to own it until 1870, when it was sold by the 7th Earl, and during that
time it was virtually unaltered. Some fifty years later, Viscount Lascelles, the son of the 5th Earl of Harewood and
also the heir to his great-uncle, the 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde, bought the house shortly before his marriage in
1922 to the Princess Royal, the daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. Soon after Viscount Lascelles’
purchase of the house it was illustrated in Country Life by H. Avray Tipping, and a second set of unpublished
photographs was taken in 1931, presumably when he decided to sell it. The unusually full set of photographs is
particularly valuable not only as a record of the building, but also of the splendid pictures in Viscount Lascelles’
collection, which included Cima’s St Jerome in his Solitude, Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, now in the National
Gallery, Longhi’s Procature Mocenigo, and Rubens’ Queen Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus. Thus the brief
Lascelles period in the house proved to be an unexpected Indian summer.
However, Viscount Lascelles, too, must have found the big house a financial strain, and after he succeeded his
father as 6th Earl in 1930 and moved to Harewood, he and the Princess Royal decided in 1931 to give up
Chesterfield House. When it was demolished in 1934, contents were scattered and later turned up in a variety of
places, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York