A VIEW ON A ROOM
Antiques expert JUDITH MILLER tours her favourite room from this issue’s houses – the drawing room in Dan Cruickshank’s Spitalfields home
RED WALL PANELLING
Inspired by the rich-red hue painted on the walls of the room used as a library, drawing, and dining room at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, Dan mixed his own version for the pannelling in his drawing room. Soane created his original paint colour, now best-known as ‘Pompeiian Red’, while studying Etruscan and Roman antiquity while on a Grand Tour in Italy, from 1778–1780.
REGENCY-STYLE SETTEE
The settee was made in 1820 and is fashioned in the Regency style. Although English, its bateau- like form, with out-splayed scroll ends and a wave-scrolled back rail reflects the influence of French design at the time. The striped upholstery fabric was popular on both sides of the Channel during the early 19th century, and is often referred to in Britain as the ‘Regency stripe’.
GATELEG TABLE
Standing on a Persian rug that dates from c1900, the dining table is English, from c1690–1710. It’s made from a mixture of oak and elm wood, and the base is of blind and pegged mortise-and-tenon construction, featuring baluster-turned legs. The nicely and naturally patinated top comprises two fixed central planks, and two hinged D- end flaps. Eminently practical in terms of its ability to be reconfigured, which enables it to be placed in the middle of a room or against a wall, the gateleg was a staple furnishing in better- off 17th and early-18th- century homes.
PAINTED CHAIR
The wooden chair beside the gateleg table was made in Ireland, probably Dublin, around the turn of the 19th century. Its basic form reflects a major stylistic transition of the time: a move away from the oval, heart, and shield chair-back designs of George Hepplewhite – which had been fashionable during the 1780s – and towards rectangular or square-back chairs. In this case it has a trellis-like splat, favoured by Thomas Sheraton.
WELSH DISPLAY CABINET
This display cabinet was made in Wales around the turn of the 18th century. Among its desirable features are elegantly configured astragal, or semi- circular, glazing bars, a fluted frieze with dentil cornice, and a wood- grained finish – stained and grained mahogany over pine carcasses. Now used as a bookcase, the top half originally would have been used to display ceramics.
TAPESTRY CHAIR
Reupholstered with a tapestry remnant from the late 19th- century Arts and Crafts movement, the beech-frame chair was made c1710 and is in the style of the French Huguenot architect and designer Daniel Marot (1661–1752). Marot’s designs in the late-baroque style were widely copied. Features include an imperious high back with scrolled and plumed cresting rail, voluptuous cabriole front legs and an extravagant scrolling foliate stretcher.
PAIR OF PORTRAITS
Dan bought this pair of portraits, painted in oil, at a Christie’s auction some 30 years ago. They were painted in the 1840s, over 100 years after the house was built, and have no direct connection with it at all, however, they certainly fit with the setting and now look as if they belong.