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POA
E. Welby Pugin
This unique Gothic Revival oak chair design can be found at the Public Record Office, Kew (BT/43/58, no. 245877)., and is titled 'front elevation of chair quarter real size,' . The chair was part of the interiors E.W. Pugin designed for the Granville Hotel in Ramsgate. Unfortunately, the hotel's failure in 1873 led to Pugin's bankruptcy. However, by 1876, some of Pugin's designs were available through Cox & Sons church furnishings company, and later designs of E.W. Pugin's furniture were also manufactured by the London cabinet maker C & R Light. Variants of this chair design have been discovered, featuring four holes as in this example, instead of five holes on each side with small rounded brass feet at the front, makers C & R Light or Cox & Sons come to mind. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York houses a similar chair, that example has brass feet and four pierced holes on the sides as this example shares. One such chair was previously owned by the painter P.H. Calderon RA who was a British painter of French birth and Spanish ancestry who initially worked in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He was also Keeper of the Royal Academy in London. Three close variants with brass feet are depicted in Jeremy Cooper's book "Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors. There is an old repair to the back left hand lower side.
