The Is This Handel's Easy Chair? Page at the George Frideric Handel Pages at the Teri Noel Towe Home Pages
Handel at 56, in 1741, the year in which he composed Messiah in the house on London's Lower Brook Street a portion of which which soon house the Handel House Museum. This image is the frontispiece to the 1760 John Mainwaring biography.
Is This Handel's Easy Chair?
I share my beloved Mother's lifelong passion for English and American furniture of the 18th century, and I caught the bug early. Some of my earliest memories are of visits to antique stores like Frederick Denson & Son, Putnam Antiques, and William's Antiques in Greenwich, Connecticut, and to this day the aromas of varnish, stain, and glue have a Proustian effect on me. Sidney Denson, Max Zaretski and his nephew Sam Krawitz, and Willy and Betty Richmond all nurtured my interest and taught me a great deal about connoisseurship. I quickly became my Mother's "partner in crime", so to speak, and I began to participate in the decision making when I was about eight or nine years old.
I recall with particular joy the day that my Mother told me that she had bought me a chair for my birthday. (My two favorite forms of American and English antique furniture then, as they are now, were the chair and what is commonly called the highboy.) This chair, she told me, was said to have belonged to George Frideric Handel, who was already one of my two favorite composers. (The other, of course, is Johann Sebastian Bach.) Needless to say, for a child of nine or ten, issues of provenance are not important, and, by the time that I was in college and realized that such things as the source and the reliability of the representation did, in fact, have great importance, Mr. Denson was nearly 90. When I asked him if he recalled any of the details, he told me that, while he could not remember the name of the elderly lady from whom he had bought the chair, he vividly remembered that she had told him that the chair had descended in her family with the tradition that it had once belonged to George Frideric Handel. He told me that it was because he knew how much I liked Handel's music that he offered the chair to my Mother before he offered it to any other of his regular and established clients.
I might add that, even though issues of provenance were of little interest to Mr. Denson, he always remembered my fascination with what are called association pieces, the tangible personal property of famous individuals. It was Mr. Denson who gave me the brass door knocker that he had been told that Congress had sent to Thomas Paine instead of awarding him the pension for which he had petitioned. It was Mr. Denson who presented me with Sidney Lanier's opera cane, which he found when he was handling the sale of the contents of the house of one of the poet's descendants. It was from Mr. Denson that we acquired the buttonwood corner cupboard that was made by Abraham Lincoln's father, Thomas Lincoln. (In fairness, however, to Max and Sam and to Willy and Betty, I have to add that they helped, too. Max and Sam sold me the umbrellas that had belonged to Colonel Jacob Ruppert, the owner of the New York Yankees during the era of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and it was from Willy and Betty that I obtained the armchair that is reputed to have been made for Benjamin Frankin.)
Since childhood, I have enjoyed sitting in the wingchair while listening to favorite recordings of Handel's music, and, scholar though I am, I personally have no problem believing that the wingchair was, in fact, as Mr. Denson told us, Handel's own. I can easily see that great burly bear of a man, heavy to the point of obesity, sinking into it, at the end of a long day of composing or rehearsing, to relax and "unwind".
I do not know why it is that I never troubled over the years to investigate further the possibility that this magnificent early eighteenth century English wingchair, a chair that the legendary dealer J. J. Wolff said was the finest of its type that he had ever seen, might actually have belonged to George Frideric Handel. The fact, is I never did. It may have been because I knew that it will almost certainly never be possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the chair is, in fact, a chair that belonged to Handel. After all, the chair came to Mr. Denson and then ultimately to me with no written documentation of any kind. For instance, there is no letter from the early 19th century from Lady Rivers, confirming that it came to her from John Christopher Smith, the Younger, who had gotten it from Handel. There is no bill of sale from Handel's Executors. There is no genealogical chart showing that the lady from whom Mr. Denson bought the chair was a direct descendant of John Du Bourk, Handel's major domo and the purchaser of the house in Brook Street and its contents. There was a part of me that quietly said that, because the provenance is so weak, so vague, and oral rather than written (I did not have the presence of mind, alas, to ask Mr. Denson to provide me with a written statement of the oral provenance that he provided for any of the association pieces that I obtained from him!) that I should simply allow the association to die with me.
The possibility that the chair might actually have been Handel's became significant, however, after I sat down to lunch several years ago with Stanley Sadie, CBE, one of the world's pre-eminent musicologists, one of the world's most passionate Handelians, and the Editor of the first two editions of the New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, and he began to tell me about the plan to turn the house in Brook Street, one of the few remaining residences of an early 18th century composer to survive the dastardly combination of urban renewal and war, into a Handel House Museum. I mentioned the existence of the chair to Stanley, carefully observing that I had not one shred of evidence to support the attribution. Stanley then reminded me that there was in fact a contemporaneous inventory of the contents of the house and that I could find it among the thousands of documents reproduced in Otto Erich Deutsch's monumental magnum opus, the anthology of primary sources entitled Handel - A Documentary Biography. I made a note of this, and a few days later, I took a few minutes to look through that inventory, albeit in a cursory and desultory fashion. I saw nothing that I thought matched the sublime wingchair that now graces my front parlor. Its absence from the inventory, of course, was not fatal; after all, it could have been one of the items that the Smiths, father and son, and Handel's close friends cherrypicked from the house before the remainder of the contents were sold to John Du Bourk.
The wingchair's association with George Frideric Handel was no stronger than before, it seemed. In fact, it might well be even weaker than before. I turned my mind to other things, now even more certain that the oral tradition that the early 18th century Engliah wingchair, with the outward scrolled arms, the cabriole legs with carved shells on the knees, and the elegantly turned understretcher, the wingchair that I treasure so much, had once been the property of George Frideric Handel should quietly cross to the other side with me.
Recently, however, I had occasion to revisit that inventory and revisit it serendipitously. As many readers already will know, I have a particular interest in composer portraits, and, for the better part of the past two years, I have been immersed in an on-going examination of the portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach, a thorough examination and re-evaluation of all of the various portraits and their accuracy as depictions of his facial features that is the natural and logical extension of my work in authenticating the Weydenhammer Portrait Fragment and proving beyond a reasonable doubt that it is what remains of the long lost portrait of Bach that belonged to his pupil, Johann Christian Kittel. I have also been working on the portraits of Handel, and have even begun to construct a page about them, but in recent years I have been able to devote next to no time to sorting out the problems that these portraits present or to making revisions and additions to my page on the Handel Portraits. Nevertheless, whenever I have a chance, I make scans of additional images to include in the archive of such images that I shall draw on when I resume my examination of the Handel portraits in earnest.
I decided to scan the frontispiece of the first American edition of the important early biography of the composer that was written by Victor Schoelcher and first published in England in 1857.
British Handel scholars do not consider the first American edition to have any significant value, but it is, to an American like me at least, noteworthy because it is the first such biography, at least of which I am aware, that was published in the United States of America. It is also noteworthy because the first American edition was, as is stated in the Preface, entirely reset and printed in the United States. It does not have the same pagination as the English original. For that reason alone, it is a fascinating artifact, but it is even more fascinating because the editors at Mason Brothers took it upon themselves to reconfigure the contents of the book, as the text of the Preface makes clear.
While working with the book, which I had not examined in several years, I was reminded that the appendices contain a trenchant, scholarly examination of the harpsichords then known that were purported to have belonged to Handel, and, I had completely forgotten, the inventory of the contents of the house in Brook Street, too. I decided to scan these pages as well. In looking through the inventory, I came across an entry that I had not taken due note of before:
"An easy chair and cushion". An easy chair and cushion?!! I went at once to confirm this entry by looking at the inventory as it is reprinted by Otto Erich Deutsch. The listing, as reprinted by Deutsch, differs only in punctuation and capitalization: "an Easy Chair & Cushion".
"Easy Chair" was the 18th Century name for what we call a wing chair. This I had known for many years, but, still, I needed to be sure. So I sent an e-mail to my friend Leslie Keno, the head of the American Furniture and Decorations Department at Sotheby's, a beloved specialist on the popular television program, The Antiques Roadshow, and one of the world's foremost authorities on American furniture of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. I asked Leslie if he would confirm for me that, in Handel's day, an easy chair was what we call a wing chair. I quote the pertinent portions of my inquiry and of Leslie's reply:
Teri, Yes, you are correct. These were also sometimes called "sick chairs"
as the wings apparently kept out the cold drafts. Leslie
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TeriNoelTowe@aol.com [SMTP:TeriNoelTowe@aol.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 3:41 PM
> To: Leslie.Keno@sothebys.com> Am I correct that, in England in 1760 and the colonies as well, an
> "easy chair" is what we now sometimes call a wing chair?Teri
>
So, my beloved wingchair might well have been Handel's after all, and it might still have been in the house in Brook Street at the time of his death!
Naturally, I have to write "might", because of the flimsy oral provenance, but in every other way the chair qualifies. It definitely could have been in the right place at the right time.
For one thing, as Leslie himself had confirmed when he saw the chair in the spring of 1999 (at which time I made no mention of its alleged association with Handel), the chair is unquestionably English and unquestionably of the period. The primary wood (that of the visible portions) is walnut. (Singinficantly, much of the furniture listed in the Inventory is described as made of walnut.) The secondary wood (that of the interior frame that is covered by the velvet upholstery) is deal, a form of pine that was commonly used in Britain in Handel's time as a secondary wood. In fact, the presence of deal, particularly as a secondary wood, is so "English" that its use in a piece of furniture of the 18th century for all practical purposes eliminates any possibility of that piece of furniture having been made in North America. The design of the chair, which is particularly graceful and without doubt the work of a cabinet maker of the highest quality, indicates a date between 1720 and 1750. The cabriole front legs with pad feet, the exquisitely carved shells on the knees of the front legs, the chamfered and flared back legs, and the elaborately shaped and turned understretcher all are hallmarks of wingchairs that were made in England during those years.
The grey velvet upholstery on the chair and its seat cushion is not the original, although in its now somewhat worn state it vividly conjures up the image of a well loved and well used chair belonging to an elderly bachelor who cared little for being "au courant". My Mother had that upholstery put on the chair over 40 years ago, but, for what little it may be worth, the chair had a seat cushion with it when she bought it for me. There is no way of knowing, of course, if the chair had always had a seat cushion, but the description of the chair in Handel's back parlor is noteworthy because of the specific mention of a cushion. From what I understand, the standard manner of upholstering wingchairs in the 18th century did not allow for a separate seat cushion, and for such a chair to have had a separate seat cushion in those days therefore was most unusual. And that might be the reason why the appraisers who valued the furnishings before they were sold to John Du Bourk made specific mention of the cushion in their description.
There is one other wrinkle, of course. A careful and sensitive assessment of the inventory makes it clear that Handel was not much interested in interior design and, when one considers the inventory in tandem with the auction catalogue that details the astonishing collection of paintings and fine art prints that Handel assembled over the course of the more than thirty years that he lived in Lower Brook Street (including two Rembrandts, one of them a landscape that some contend is the famous painting familarly known as "The Old Mill" that is now in the National Gallery in Washington, D. C.), it is clear that the furniture in his house was of secondary, if not tertiary, importance to him. (My beloved mother always maintained that you had to chose between collecting fine furniture or collecting fine pictures and that you could not do both!) In other words, Handel was the kind of a guy who went to the equivalent of Crate & Barrel, IKEA, or Ethan Allen to buy household furnishings. How then do I explain how Handel ended up owning a chair as magnificent as the one that now graces my living room? I like to think that it was a gift, a "housewarming" present, from one of his affluent friends and patrons.
I doubt that we will ever know for certain whether I do, in fact, own an easy chair that once belonged to George Frideric Handel, but the sentimental and romantic part of me, rigorously trained scholar though I am, takes great delight in the possibility, however tenuous and circumstantial the evidence. And those possibilities are absolutely delightful. If, in fact, I do have that easy chair that once graced Handel's back parlor, when I sit in it, I sit where he sat, where Mrs. Delany (aka, Mrs. Pendarves) may have sat, where John Beard may have sat, where Geminiani, Senesino, Cuzzoni, Strada, Frasi, Guadagni, Dubourg, Mrs. Cibber, de Fesch, "Bunny" Granville, Roubilliac, Goupy, Charles Jennens, Dr. Morell, the Smiths father and son, and so many others may have sat.
When I sit in the chair, I cannot help but recall Mary Delany Pendarves's letter to her sister, Ann Granville, about the night that she entertained Handel, who lived just down the street, and some of her other close friends:
"..... Mr. Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o' the clock till eleven. I gave them tea and coffee, and about a half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine and biscuits. Everybody was easy and seemed pleased...."
Teri Noel Towe
October 14, 2001
Please click on 
to return to the George Frideric Handel Index Page.
Please click on the 
to return to the Teri Noel Towe Welcome Page.
Copyright, Teri Noel Towe, 2001
All Rights Reserved
The Statue of Handel that was commissioned from Roubilliac by the promoters who owned the notorious Vauxhall Gardens, a
libertine pleasure garden that was the "Heaven" or "Studio 54" of its day.
The Is This Handel's Easy Chair? Page at the Teri Noel Towe Home Pages is a PPP Free web page.
The Is This Handel's Easy Chair? Page at the Teri Noel Towe Home Pages has received the HIP Woolly Mammoth Stamp of
Approval from The HIP-ocrisy Home Page.
