Dutch Colonial Ebony Chair, Batavia

Dutch Colonial Ebony Chair with Low-Relief Carving & Ivory Detail

This chair of solid ebony has twist-turned lower rails (spindles) and legs, seat rails or aprons carved in low relief with leaf and flower motifs, stiles similarly carved and cross and back rails that are finely and densely carved with swirling floral and leaf motifs. The cross and back rails are separated by twist-turned pegs. The tops of the front legs are finished with turned ivory roundels. The rear stiles are surmounted by ears in the form of carved pineapples or some similar fruits or cones. The seat is of woven cane or rattan. This is later and a closer weave of rattan has been used.

This chair of solid ebony is almost identical to the first chair illustrated in the most authoritative work published on Dutch colonial furniture

Furniture from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India During the Dutch Period, by Jan Veenendaal, 1985, (see p. 21), although in the example here, the tops of the front legs have the roundels of ivory. The Veenendaal example is attributed to Batavia, 1650-80. Tchakalaoff (1998, p. 111) also illustrates a related example in Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkude, Leiden.

It is now believed that such chairs originally were commissioned by senior VOC officials and their wives for use in church.

As Jaffer (2002, p. 46) states, no other group of Indo-European furniture has been as misunderstood as carved ebony furniture from Sri Lanka, India and the Dutch Est Indies. The furniture is of solid ebony, carved with varying degrees of relief and has twist-turned rails and other components.

Carved ebony chairs of the type here have been recorded in English collections since the mid-eighteenth century according to Jaffer and much confusion as to their origins has been caused by the nineteenth century presumption that such chairs were surviving examples of early English furniture, most likely dating to the Elizabethan period. Jaffer pinpoints Horace Walpole (1717-97) with this mis-attribution. He acquired two ebony chairs from Esher Palace, Surrey and thought that they had been the property of Cardinal Wolsey who had lived there after 1519. He acquired these and other similar types of furniture mostly at auction to furnish his Gothic revival house, Strawberry Hill. The house and its contents became much celebrated. By the early nineteenth century, Walpole’s view that the ebony furniture that he had acquired was English and early had become well established.

Further mis-attribution of such chairs arises because chairs of this type were produced in southern India, Sri Lanka and Batavia in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Indeed, in the past, this particular chair has been misidentified as being of Indian origin. (It was included in Sotheby’s London ‘The Indian Sale’ , May 23, 2006, and catalogued as colonial Indian.) Further complications arose because chairs and related furniture made in one of the three locations tended to be imported to either of the other two by relocating Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials or were traded by the VOC on a commercial basis between the three locations.

Veenendaal (1985) argues that those of Batavian or at least Dutch East Indies origin tend to have low rather than high relief carving. Also, the twist-turned rails of Indian and Ceylonese examples tend to have ‘tighter’ or more closely carved twists.

The condition of this chair is very good, particularly given its age. Their are few significant chips, damage or repairs. There are the remnants of holes in the top of the cross rail between the twist-turned pegs which suggest that additional small decorative finials might have existed between the pegs but if any such finials existed then they also are missing from the similar chair illustrated in Veenendaal and also from the chair illustrated in Tchakaloff. Also, the legs would have sat on ball feet which no longer are present. Overall, it is a rare, early and important example of Batavian Dutch colonial furniture.