£395.00
An attractive Aesthetic Movement Thebes style stool, comprising four ring turned legs with the characteristic dished seat. The double stretchers are each connected to the seat by six decorative struts.
The Thebes stool was originally designed for Liberty & Co by Leonard Wyburd (1865-1958), the director of their Furnishing and Decoration Studio, established in 1883. Liberty registered the design of their stool (Number 16673) at the Patent Office in 1884 and it continued to be sold until about 1919. The Ancient Egyptian original which provided inspiration, was reputed to have been discovered at Thebes, Egypt and was made between 1400 to 1300 BC. It forms part of a collection of Egyptian domestic furniture which had been acquired by the British Museum between 1829 and 1835. Stools were made for Liberty & Co by the firm of William Birch, and/or B. North & Sons, both of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
A revival of interest in the art and architecture of Ancient Egypt may have been encouraged by the opening of the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, London, in 1854. Egyptian-influenced furniture had already been made by Morris, Faulkner & Co (the forerunner of Morris & Co) between 1857 and 1858, and designed during the 1870s by tastemakers Dr Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) and Edward William Godwin (1833-1886).
Other examples of the design and variations on it survive. The popular Victorian painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema owned an elaborate version in ebony and ivory which was illustrated in “Some English Artists and Their Studios” by Cosmo Monkhouse, in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, number 24 (1882). Various examples were produced in walnut, mahogany, oak and beech.
Much of E.W. Godwin’s output, which also included distinctive ebonised chairs and tables with Thebes style struts, was retailed though Liberty & Co to avant garde customers such as Godwin’s close friends Oscar Wilde and the American painter James McNeill Whistler.
Our example is of very good quality and generous proportions, in dark stained birch, and owes much in design to Godwin and to Liberty’s Thebes Chair of circa 1880 (also pictured below), but with double rather than single stretchers and a different arrangement of struts that includes crossed diagonals that we have not seen previously. There is a partial label, but insufficient to identify the origins of the piece any more accurately than in the manner of Liberty & Co, probably by William Birch.
Newly reupholstered in Mulberry Lee Jofa Berber Stripe woven jute fabric with stud detailing.
English, circa 1885.
Dimensions:
Height: 52 cm (20.5 inches)
Width: 43 cm (17 inches)
Depth: 36 cm (14 inches)
Please enquire for delivery cost.
