The King's Bed and its furniture at Knole: this rare and magnificent seventeenth-century state bed and its accompanying furniture were probably made in Paris for the Duke of York, later James II. Christopher Rowell examines new evidence about their history

Apollo, Nov, 2004 by Christopher Rowell

The French context

The style of the seat furniture is, in certain respects, strongly reminiscent of the finest 1670s and early 1680s Parisian furniture now extremely rare but still preserved in England at Ham, Boughton and Burghley, and in Sweden at Salsta, Skokloster and Orbyhus, among a very few places. One can, for example, draw a comparison between the ram's head arms of the armchairs and the dolphin arms of the so called 'dolphin' chairs at Ham. (31) A gilt-bronze ram's head also appears as a pommel on one of the French saddles given to the Swedish King in 1673. (32) Such zoomorphic motifs are typical of Parisian furniture of the mid-1670s, and the strongly sculptural carving of the legs in the form of amorini can be paralleled in, say, the furniture of Pierre Gole at this date (albeit for bureaux, cabinets and stands).

None the less, chair and stool legs made up elf standing figures might be considered--at least in England--as more typical of the following decade. However, the only surviving example is the furniture en suite with the James II bed at Knole of 1688, probably by the royal joiner, Thomas Roberts. (33) The front legs of the very similar chairs formerly at Glemham Hall, Suffolk, matching the Glemham bed, have terminal heads. (34) This type of English furniture must have derived from earlier French models, of which the King's Bed suite may be a unique survivor, and both these sets have only the front legs in the form of figures or terms, allowing the back legs to be raked. The upright and broad proportions of the King's Bed armchairs are akin more to the 1670s and early 1680s than to the more attenuated outline of the mid- to late 1680s, despite having slightly higher hacks than the Ham dolphin chairs, or the Burghley and Salsta sets. The fringing of the seat furniture also harks hack to the 1670s by being straight, rather than bunched in the serpentine line characteristic of the following decade.

Jackson-Stops noted various French elements, including 'the domed feet formed of acanthus leaves with a toe-like scroll in front, and the vertical, rather than raked, back legs of the armchairs'. (35) Thornton drew attention to 'the arrangement of their stretchers in the form of an "H" [and] a separate and elaborately carved stretcher set high between the front legs'. (36) Geoffrey Beard observed that the 'carved toes of the squab.-frames [porte-carreaux] are of a characteristic Parisian form.' (37) These have caned seats, and are plainer in their decoration than the chairs and stools, but they do seem to have been originally en suite, and were certainly part of the set in 1694. Their design is rinse to the porte-carreaux of about 1672 once in the Trianon de Porcelaine. The immensely rare surviving pair of French giltwood porte-carreaux at Ham (of about 1675) is also caned, unlike the rest of the upholstered furniture (no longer extant) described in the 1679 inventory of the Queen's Bedchamber. (38)

The King's Bed's mixture of gold and silver in the textiles and the gilding and silvering of the frames is also typical of France rather than England, certainly as early as the 1670s. (39) One only has to think of the Knole silvered and gilded side table and flanking stands attributed to Pierre Gole et al., the probable gift in about 1670 of Louis XIV to the 6th Earl of Dorset, (40) and the Gole boulle bureau of about 1672 at Boughton. (41) However, analysis indicates that the King's Bed set was originally entirely of burnished water gilding--which Peter Thuring regards as equally indicative of French practice at this date--and that the oil gilding and silvering were added much later. Subsequently, the frames were coated with black varnish and the present gilding and silvering dates from the radical and regrettable restoration of 1968, carried out on the assumption that this was the original decoration. (42)