Painted and Gilt Neoclassical Armchair

Every so often a chair turns up that belongs to a different conversation. This one comes out of the neoclassical tradition that swept Europe's drawing rooms after Napoleon, when furniture went Greek and Egyptian overnight and every good chair grew lions, palmettes and columns and it was made in the twentieth century by people who still knew how to do that properly. It is the odd one out in our catalogue and we like it precisely for that.

The frame is painted a soft cream and picked out in gilt wherever a line needed drawing, a beaded band along the crest rail, leaf carving along the seat rail, fluting down the turned spindles that carry the back. Between them, an X-form splat crosses at a gilded rosette and on the rail beneath sits the chair's small theatre, two black lions in profile flanking a gilt palmette, the Empire signature in miniature.

The arms sweep down in scrolled supports, and the whole sits on turned and fluted front legs. Seat, back panel and arm pads are covered in a pale blue and gold damask woven with medallions and scrolls, trimmed in braid, the kind of textile that looks better slightly faded, which it has obligingly begun to do.

For the room that wanted one European note among the Indian timber, the dressing table that deserves its chair, or the collector who saw the lions and stopped scrolling. Sit up straight. The chair insists.