Chair in Museum, Rome (after Sir Francis Drake’s Chair), c.1880–1900

Claude Pemberton Leach (1858–1951)

Chair in Museum, Rome (after Sir Francis Drake’s Chair), c.1880–1900

Pencil on laid paper, inscribed upper right; framed

An architect’s eye on an English icon encountered abroad. Leach records the celebrated “Drake’s Chair” , the Bodleian Library’s 17th-century armchair made from the timbers of the Golden Hind distilling its structure into pure architecture: triple arcades, paired colonnettes and a shallow domed crest. The inscription “Chair in Museum, Rome” suggests he studied a reproduction or display in Rome, a reminder of how Victorian design education circulated historic models internationally. A compelling Grand-Tour-meets-Elizabethan curiosity that sits beautifully with casts and models.

Comparable: Bodleian Library, Oxford, “Drake’s Chair,” 1662. 

Leach, trained under Sir Arthur Blomfield and elected A.R.I.B.A. in 1881, travelled and sketched historic forms. Here he translates the richly carved Bodleian original, emblem of Drake’s circumnavigation into a measured, almost archaeological rendering. Whether seen in a Roman museum of industrial art/design or via a travelling display, the sheet embodies late-Victorian habits of learning from exemplary objects through copies and prints.