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'Waterloo Elm' armchair

  • Maker

    Manufactured by Thomas Chippendale the Younger (1749-1822)

  • Detail

    Elm, with original leather seat; brass lettering and enamelled plaque

    96.5 x 61 x 49.5 cm

    English (London), after 1818

  • Provenance

    Presumably Edward Vernon Utterson (1777-1856); […]; reputedly acquired ‘at a country house sale in the 1950s’; thence by descent; H. Blairman & Sons, 2012; private collection

  • Literature

    H. Blairman & Sons, Furniture and Works of Art (2012), no. 5

    Judith Goodison, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale Junior, 2017, fig. 141

  • Collection

    Private collection

  • Notes

    The wood from which this chair was made comes from surviving remains of the elm tree adjacent to which Wellington issued the final order to advance at the end of the Battle of Waterloo (1815).  The remainder of this much sought after relic was rescued by John Children, F.R.S., F.S.A. (1777-1852) in 1818, after it was felled by the owner of the land on which it stood; see Geoffrey de Bellaigue, ‘The Waterloo Elm’, Furniture History XIV (1978), pp. 14-18.

    The proposed provenance is strongly suggested by the unusual initials ‘E.V.U.’ on the plaque.  Utterson was an antiquary and bibliophile and, like Children, had been educated at Eton; just the sort of individual one might expect to have commissioned such a chair.  According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a seven-day sale of his possessions was held from 20 to 27 March 1857, but attempts to consult a catalogue have, to date, been unsuccessful. The ‘Catalogue of the Extensive and Valuable Collections of Works of Art formed by that Distinguished Amateur Edward Vernon Utterson’ (Christie’s, 24 April 1857) does not include the chair.

    The antiquarian form of the present chair derives from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European chairs; see, for example, a Dutch chair dating from the first half of the seventeenth century in Derde Geheel and Vermeer Derde Druk, Catalogus van Meubelen en Betimmeringen, Amsterdam, 1952, pl. 43.

    Other furniture made from the Waterloo Elm includes a chair by Thomas Chippendale the Younger, commissioned by Children for George IV; another made for the Duke of Wellington, and a third for the Duke of Rutland; see de Bellaigue (op. cit), figs. 26 & 27.  There is a quaich made for Sir Walter Scott, at Abbotsford; a table cabinet sold at Phillips (Edinburgh), 28 March 1997, lot 237 and another sold at Christie’s (London), 6 July 2000, lot 10.  There is also a table, sold at Christie’s (London), 10 May 2006, lot 140.