A spectacular and exceptionally rare pair of English, possibly Irish, George III circa 1800 wall brackets or shelves in ‘Rustic’ style, the cusped shaped tops in original ‘red ochre’ paint with period brass hanging tabs, the tapering ‘bodies’ composed of fully gilded twigs and rootwood in original finish.
Provenance: The collection of Sir John Boorman at The Glebe, Annamoe, County Wicklow, Ireland.
The ‘Rustic’ style in design emerged in Great Britain from the ‘Picturesque’ movement within Romanticism of the 18th century as a quiet rebellion against the formality of Baroque and Neoclassical architectural styles and was largely ephemeral due to it’s inherently specific application; that it being intended for the ‘cottage orné’, follies, and grottos of the landed gentry. Frances Collard states “Rustic furniture, particularly that made of untrimmed branches and roots, appeared in the designs of Thomas Chippendale and Thomas Johnson and were featured in an anonymous work published by Josiah Taylor’s ‘Architectural Library, “Ideas for Rustic Furniture”, from 1790-5″. The Duke of Buccleuch’s “Bower”, a famous “Rustic” interior of the period, is described in Louis Simond’s ‘Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, during the years 1810 and 1811, by a French Traveller’ as “inside was covered; walls, ceiling, chairs, and sofa, with moss ingeniously woven into a solid velvetty matting; the tables and frames of seats were of rough sticks and roots….”. Given the exclusivity of the ‘Rustic’ style, as opposed to the ubiquitousness and egalitarianism of neoclassicism in the Georgian period, and the unorthodox nature of materials and construction, little survives today.
Literature:
Collard, Frances. ‘Regency Furniture’. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1985, pp. 227-32.
Simond, Louis. ‘Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, during the years 1810 and 1811, by a French Traveller: With remarks on the country, its arts, literature, and politics, and on the manners and customs of its inhabitants’. Edinburgh: George Ramsay and Company, for Archibald Constable and Company, and Edinburgh and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815, Vol. I., p. 344.
Heckscher, Morrison. ‘Eighteenth Century Rustic Furniture Designs’. London: The Furniture History Society, “Furniture History”, 1975, Vol. XI, pp. 59-65.
