On display in the Parlour at Montacute House is a suite of 18th century embroidered furniture, consisting of a settee, ten chairs and a four-panel screen. The scenes depicted are taken from classical mythology, chiefly from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses and
Fasti. The photograph above shows the settee, depicting the hero Achilles disguised as a woman, and a chair illustrating the legend of Hercules and Omphale. There is a cover on the chair on the other side of the settee to protect it from sunlight.
A clearer photograph of one of the chairs is shown on the right (copyright NTPL / Paul Higham). This one depicts the story of Boreas and Oreithyia from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The embroidered suite has been on display at Montacute since 1945, thanks to the generosity of its owner, Major J.G.B. Chester, who loaned the furniture to the National Trust. The suite is believed to have been made for the Major’s ancestral home, Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire, around the time it was rebuilt in the early 1720s.
Lovely to see this furniture again and interesting to see the use of a bold check case on one of the chairs. I blogged about chair cases mid-August http://pegsandtails.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/the-case-for-protecting-upholstery/
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for the comment, and also for the mention on your blog which has brought some very welcome traffic our way! I'm afraid I hadn't come across your blog before, but it looks really interesting -- I've just added it to our blog roll and to my own RSS reader so I can keep track of it regularly. Hopefully we will have more posts of interest to you in the not-too-distant future.
ReplyDeleteOf the ten chairs and settee in the room, most have covers on at any given time, and only a few are left uncovered for visitors to see. As I understand it, the covers (which personally I think are hideous) are copied from an eighteenth century design.
ReplyDeleteThese chairs are delightful! Thanks to Pegs and 'Tails for bringing me here!
ReplyDeleteThanks very much! Hope you have time to come back to the blog in future - we may have more to interest you!
DeleteThe embroidered suite has been on display at Montacute since 1945.
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