Two chairs

1844

LEWIS NOCKALLS COTTINGHAM (1787-1847)

These two chairs are part of a series of twenty, conceived by Lewis Cottingham for the large dining room of Brougham Hall, Westmorland (Cumbria), in the north of England. The residence was known as the ‘Windsor of the North’.

IN DETAIL

Dimensions

105 x 56 x 54 cm

Technique

Oak, with padding dating back to around 1930

Description

The twenty chairs designed by Cottingham, and executed by Samuel Pratt, were delivered to Lord Brougham on 2 August 1844. Visible in a nineteenth-century photo, twelve of these chairs re-emerged on the market in 1991, when they were acquired by Blairman. One couple is then purchased by Francesca and Massimo Valsecchi, while others reach the Victoria and Albert Museum of London or the Cooper Hewitt Museum of New York.

The neo-Gothic style is more decorated than the models proposed in the same years by Augustus Pugin, who proposed a declared simplification of the forms.