Brussels Chair

Designed by George Walton
(1867-1933)

Mahogany, inlaid with harewood; the upholstery of later date
48 in (122 cm) x 221/4 in (56.5 cm) x 181/2 in (46.7 cm)
English, circa 1899

The Brussels armchair takes its name from a design originally conceived by Walton for the Kodak showroom in Brussels; see Karen Moon, George Walton Designer and Architect, Oxford, 1993, pls 94 and 137.

Walton, in common with many other designers from the Arts and Crafts period, frequently revealed a debt to the forms of sophisticated, English metropolitan furniture dating from Georgian period; see, for example, Frances Collard Kenton & Co. The Decorative Arts Society Journal, 20 (1996), pp. 29-33. The design of the Brussels chair, which also exists without arms, can be compared to chairs made in England during the first decades of the eighteenth century; see, for example, a chair dated to about 1710 in Percy Macquoid and Ralph Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, revised edn, London, 1954, I, p. 254, fig. 84. The thin turned legs on Waltons chair were also a feature on his marginally earlier Regency-inspired chairs used in Miss Cranstons Buchanan Street tea room; see Moon, op. cit., figs. 62-63.

A Brussels armchair, without the inlaid decoration, is in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and another is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A version with the inlaid back was offered by Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh, 17 November 2000, lot 357.