Master Art

REF963

Each with curved back and scrolled arms terminating in rams heads with anthemion raised upon sabre legs and mounted with gilt paterae.

This pair of armchairs in the French neoclassical style is most probably from the workshop of Morel and Hughes. The use of ram’s head terminals is very similar to two other examples by the above makers: the first supplied to the 1st Earl of Bradford for Weston Park, Staffordshire, between 1806-1807 and the other supplied to the 13th Earl of Clanricarde or possibly his son, the 1st Marques of Clanricarde and then by descent to the Earls of Harewood. The suite was eventually situated at Chesterfield House, Mayfair. The Harewoods themselves were also great patrons of Morel and Hughes.


Nicholas Morel and Robert Hughes established their workshop on 13 Great Marlborough Street, London, in 1805, each of them a highly skilled and successful cabinetmaker in his own right. Morel, for example, had worked on the decoration of the Prince of Wales’s Carlton House under the direction of the architect Henry Holland and had also supplied furnishings for the Prince’s hunting box at The Grange, Hampshire. Morel and Hughes continued to make furniture for the Prince, later George IV, as well as for the Dukes of Buccleuch, Northumberland, Bedford and the Earl of Mansfield.  The partnership between Morel and Hughes was dissolved in 1827 when Nicholas Morel formed a new partnership with George Seddon. This probably came about for the practical reasons of Morel having been appointed to furnish the new royal apartments at Windsor Castle and Seddon being the only one with a workshop large enough to cope with this immense commission.