Queen Charlotte kept four chairmen for her sedan chair at an annual salary of £39 17s 6d, a figure which remained constant from the 1770s until her death. Her chair-maker was Samuel Vaughan of Coventry Street, Piccadilly, who succeeded to the business first established at this address by Edward and George Vaughan. In the 1780s the firm was known as Vaughan, Holmes and Griffin and later as Holmes and Griffin or Griffin & Co.. This chair bears the label of Griffin, with an address at Whitcomb Street occupied by the firm from 1791: this label was probably applied to the chair during maintenance by Vaughan’s successor.

On 1 January 1763 Samuel Vaughan was paid by Queen Charlotte’s Treasurer £185 5s 4d for a new chair and on the same date the chaser and gilder D.N. Anderson was paid £250 ‘for decorating & Ornamentg a Sedan Chair’. These payments seem likely to be connected with this chair, which is covered in red morocco and extravagantly decorated with gilt metal of extremely thin substance (for lightness of weight). The wide range of ornament includes the British lion and unicorn emerging from acanthus scrolls, swags of roses, laurel wreaths, oak and laurel sprays and the infant Mercury aboard a sailing boat, all framed by palm branches. The symbolic language of Victory employed here - similar in several respects to that of the Gold State Coach - would certainly have been appropriate to the period immediately following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763.

The author of this decorative scheme is not known, but James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, who designed a new throne for Queen Charlotte at St James’s Palace, has been proposed by Mr John Harris.

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004.