Chair
(c. 1790)

• ENGLAND (manufacturer)

James Wyatt was the leading Neoclassical architect and designer in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. A fierce rival of Robert Adam, the other leading architect of the day, Wyatt was admired as the model of a properly trained architect and played a key role in establishing Neoclassicism as the mainstream English style of the last thirty years of the eighteenth century.

In 1790 Wyatt was commissioned to design a new house at Henham Park, Suffolk by John Rous, 6th Baronet, a full-length portrait of whom, along with a full-length portrait of his wife, Lady Rous, is held in the NGV Collection. Wyatt is known to have designed the principal interiors for all of his houses. This suite would have been made for the drawing room or the saloon, both exceedingly elegant interiors that were used for entertaining, with the furniture arranged around the walls. The suite, which comprises eleven (originally twelve) armchairs and two settees, is in the Neoclassical style of the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the current iteration of the suite dates to the 1860s, when it received a complete makeover, probably due to a fire in the house. This mid nineteenth-century decorative approach references French taste of the Louis XVIth period (1774–92), a very fashionable style in England at the time.