Portuguese furniture making from the 17th and 18th centuries is endowed with specific features that distance it from its European counterparts, particularly for its favoured choice of raw materials – the solid, dense and patterned exotic Brazilian hardwoods – that give it its mellow and contrasting tones and subtle dark shades. These characteristics that reinforce chromatic impact and allow for virtuosity of ornament, were successfully exploited by Portuguese cabinetmakers, particularly from the early 18th century, and reached a climax with the successful interpretation and transfer of “Rocaille” aesthetic principles into furniture typologies.

One other important and defining feature of this national production, concerns the late use, within the European context, of engraved and embossed leather - exuberantly decorated with floral, foliage or heraldic motifs inspired by textile patterns but of sober monochromes - for the coating of seats and backs of chairs, settees and daybeds. This utilitarian, as well as decorative solution, endows Portuguese seating furniture from this period with unique and differentiated exoticism.

This Portuguese cabinet-making stylistic specificity will gradually loose its distinctiveness and defining character from the early second-third of the 18th century onwards, as a process of increasing assimilation of external models takes hold. The “National style”, differentiated and proudly assumed for most of the previous seventy years or so, will progressively give way to aesthetic references from French as well as English models - be it conspicuous guitar shaped chair backs “violonée” or vigorous baluster splats – that will merge, in each furniture piece, stylistic references from both productions while diluting any specifically Portuguese characteristics.

Important set of fifteen D. João V / D. José transition period chairs, made in rich and deep orange-brown Brazilian rosewood timbers, with raised, undulating and pierced backs crowned by a masterly carved plumed crest, and with floral, foliage and shell embossed and engraved leather drop-in seats. The structure is assembled in the traditional “mortice and tenon” joint technique reinforced by pegs in the same timber.

The chair backs, almost excessively tall but opulent and elegant, outlined by “violonée” waved stiles diverging at the base - of Louis XV influence – and filled by robust baluster splats - in the English George II manner – are successful examples of the sophisticated stylistic hybridism characteristic of Portuguese furniture of the period, that was particularly evidenced in the numerous seating typologies.

The perfectly symmetrical top crest, carved and pierced in delicate floral and foliage scroll motifs, is centred by stylized Prince of Wales plumes. The drop-in undulating, trapezoid shaped seat, covered in engraved and embossed leather, fits onto an inner lip, cut into the seat rail that is reinforced by two front brackets of a less noble timber. An elegant but discreet low-relief foliage motif decorates the rail apron.

The cabriole front legs, of pronounced knees thinning at mid-height and ending on pad feet, and the robust back legs ending on rectangular plinths, are joined by carved undulating “H” shaped stretchers, and by a single turned back-stretcher with central nodule.

These exceptional set of twelve chairs, of which four feature minor differences relatively to the remaining eight, most certainly commissioned as a larger set, are excellent illustrative examples of the elegance and masterly characteristics of Portuguese furniture from the mid-18th century.

Bibliography:

— FREIRE, Fernanda Castro (Coord.), Mobiliário, Móveis de Assento e de Repouso, Vol. I, Lisboa, F.R.E.S.S., 2001, pp. 13 – 14, 18 – 22.