Robert Adam chairs for auction

9:14am Sunday 8th June 2008

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Two giltwood armchairs, which cost around £12.50p each when they were supplied new for a Rickmansworth mansion nearly 250 years ago, are now up for sale again and this time they are expected to fetch nearer half a million pounds for the pair.

The so-called Moor Park Chairs were designed by Robert Adam, architect to King George III, and were commissioned by wealthy baronet Sir Lawrence Dundas for the banqueting hall at his newly-acquired Moor Park Mansion, now the home of Moor Park Golf Club.

Sir Lawrence bought Moor Park in 1763 for £25,000 and bought the two armchairs for £12.10s.5d each, or about £12.52p in modern money, the following year, on October 24,1764.

Since then the value of the Moor Park Chairs has rocketed and they are now expected to fetch between £250,000 to £400,000 when they are auctioned at Christie's in London on June 18.

Sir Lawrence died in 1781, but his chairs stayed at Moor Park for another 138 years until 1919, when they were owned by the third Lord Ebury. Lord Ebury's nephew, the fifth Lord Ebury, sold the chairs during the Second World War.

Christie's confirmed: "These magnificent golden chairs belong to the remarkable suite of seat-furniture designed in 1764 by Robert Adam, architect to King George III, for the banqueting hall at Moor Park.

"The Moor Park Suite was among the most expensive suites of seat furniture executed in the 18th century and the first profoundly neo-classical suite of seat furniture to survive as a legacy of Sir Lawrence Dundas's enlightened patronage."

Yet little is known about James Lawson, the man who made the Moor Park Chairs, although Christie's describe him as "clearly a cabinet maker of exceptional reputation and ability".

Christie's say each chair has an "arched padded back, outscrolled arms and seat covered in cream foliate cotton, the front of the arms with pierced entrelac band and terminating in paterae, the seat rails with pierced flowered guilloche frieze, the front corners with ram's heads on tapering cabriole legs, headed by acanthus scrolls and husks with flowerhead ears, on hoof feet, minor replacements to the carved decoration, including four flowers in the frieze and two floral scroll ends on arms, originally with sunk castors within the hoof feet, originally oil-gilt, now water-gilt with traces of original gilding."

One of Sir Lawrence Dundas's descendants, Lord David Dundas, who was 63 on Monday, reached number three in the record charts in the summer of 1976 with his composition, Jeans On, which was originally an advertising jingle for Brutus Jeans.

He also wrote Fourscore, the music for the launch of Channel Four which was used by them for a decade.

Another of Sir Lawrence's descendants, the Earl of Ronaldshay, 43, became the Queen Mother's official sausage maker. Between 1993 and 1999 Ronaldshay was managing director of Musks Ltd, the Newmarket firm which had the Queen Mother's royal warrant for sausages.