The present chairs predate the important suites of transitional seat furniture supplied by Chippendale and Robert Adam for Sir Lawrence Dundas in 1765-66.¹ Supplied in circa 1760-64 by James Stuart, Adam’s archrival, they are among the earliest expressions of Neoclassicism in furniture in England, with antique ornament applied to a French serpentine form, and among the most significant seat furniture of this period.

The chairs were conceived for the Great Drawing Room of Nuneham Park, similarly identified as ‘arguably the first neo-classical interior in England’.² Crowned with a magnificent tripartite ceiling created by Stuart after Inigo Jones’ at Banqueting House, the chairs were photographed in the room for Country Life in 1913.

Around the same time Stuart designed two suites of seat furniture of a nearly identical model for Spencer House. The three suites were undoubtedly made by the same master chair-maker, likely John Gordon (d. 1777). They share characteristics, notably the cupid’s-bow formed by the front rail and legs, with Gordon’s documented seat furniture for the Duke of Atholl at Blair Castle, supplied in 1748 and during the 1750s.³ Surviving bills reveal that Gordon was supplying furniture to the Spencers by 1772, also ‘repairing and gilding’ the hall lantern and making ‘loose covers’ for Stuart’s Painted Room suite. The theory of a longstanding relationship between Gordon and Earl Spencer’s steward, Thomas Townsend, is confirmed by his appointment as Gordon’s executor.

Stuart’s first instructions at Nuneham were for architectural designs, modifying Stiff Leadbetter’s original plans. In December 1756, Simon Harcourt wrote his friend Thomas Worsley that he had ‘boldly adventured’ to follow Stuart’s drawing of the screen marking the reservoir of the Aqueduct of Hadrian for his new villa’s four Venetian windows. The February before, just four months after Stuart’s return from Greece, Lady Harcourt had written to her son Lord Nuneham: ‘I think I have not yet told you how highly I have been entertained lately by a sight of some drawings of Mr Stewart’s of the remains of Grecian Antiquities.’ Thus, Nuneham became the first house in England to quote directly from ancient Greece. His own architect (he was a Dilettanti), Harcourt took this further, replacing the Roman ionic capitals of the original screen with the Greek Ionic order of the temple on the Ilissus, making these windows the first examples of the Greek Ionic order in Britain.⁴

Harcourt was a politician, army man and diplomat, created Earl in 1749 for his services to the crown in the Jacobite Rebellion. As Weber writes, he ‘seldom experienced a career setback from his appointment as Lord of the Bedchamber in 1753 to his retirement as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1777’.⁶

He was a close friend of the King and Queen, maintaining the family tradition of close royal links established his grandfather, 1^st Viscount Harcourt, who was visited by Queen Anne at nearby Cokethorpe. The Viscount (1661-1727), a lawyer who became Lord High Chancellor, is remembered for his powerful oratory in the Commons. Famously in 1710 he defended Henry Sacheverell at his impeachment trial, a major political and social sensation which deeply divided the nation.

In 1751 Simon was appointed governor to the Prince of Wales and after his accession became in 1761 the special ambassador to Mecklenburg-Strelitz to negotiate a marriage between King George and Princess Charlotte, whom he personally escorted to England from Germany. The Earl’s son Lord Nuneham, later the 2^nd Earl, was tutor to George III when he was Price of Wales and after his father’s death often hosted the King and Queen at Nuneham. George described the house and its fine grounds as ‘the most enjoyable place I know’ when he and Queen Charlotte 1786 visit, a few years after Jean Jacque Rousseau’s own in 1767.⁷

In 1841, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stayed after their wedding. Describing the ‘pleasure grounds…the Thames winding along beneath them, and Oxford in the distance’, Victoria recalled the first Lord Harcourt’s admission in 1756 that the ‘charming view…was my chief inducement to build’.⁸ Lewis Carol’s visits to Nuneham in the 1860s with Alice Liddell and her family became the basis for his stories in  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and the house and famed park also inspired Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. Edward VII was a guest at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Nuneham was one of the most significant new houses of the 1750s, signalling the revival in Britain of the villa which had not entered the mainstream of Palladianism when first deployed by Colen Campbell in the 1720s. The house later attracted Henry Holland and Capability Brown. In the 1730s the Duchess of Portland described Harcourt as ‘rakish’ and Horace Walpole, ever a man with something to say, that he is ‘a marvel of pomposity and propriety’.⁹ He died rescuing his favourite dog which had fallen into a well while the pair had been out for a walk. Harcourt was found head first down the well with only his lower legs and feet visible above the water and the dog sitting on his feet.

¹ A. Bowett and J. Lomax, Thomas Chippendale 1718-1779: A Celebration of British Craftsmanship and Design (2018), pp. 86-93

² Francis Russell, ‘The Hanging and Display of Pictures, 1700 – 1850’ in Gervase Jackson-Stops, ed., The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 25 (Washington: National Gallery of Art; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), p. 141

³ P. Thornton and J. Hardy, ‘The Spencer Furniture at Althorp - II’, Apollo (1968), p. 448

⁴ G. Worsley, ‘Nuneham Park Revisited – I’, Country Life (3 January 1985), p. 18

⁶ Weber Soros, (ed.), James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (2006), p. 162

⁷ https://www.globalretreatcentre.org/history-of-nuneham-house/

⁸ G. Worsley, ‘Nuneham Park Revisited – I’, Country Life (3 January 1985), p. 17

⁹ Weber Soros, (ed.), James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (2006), p. 162