Grendy's furniture was largely designed for the middling market making him particularly appropriate for the Geffrye Museum's collections which seek to represent middle-class consumption. The form of the chairs is particularly interesting – a fashionable, urban version of a traditional ladder-back chair, itself an adaptation of Dutch chairs imported from in the seventeenth century. The chairs originally had rush seats; walnut, rush-seated chairs are frequently mentioned in the inventories of middling Londoners' parlours and dining rooms, but rarely survive with their rush seats in tact. In addition, very few surviving pieces of London furniture can be securely connected to a maker, making these chairs very significant for Furniture History.

Provenance

Newport Church, Essex. One chair was on loan to the V&A from 1974.