A lost piece of Chippendale furniture will soon be returned to its original home at Paxton House in the Scottish Borders. The Paxton Secretaire, commissioned in the 1770s, has recently been re-acquired and conserved by the Paxton Trust with the support of several donors, including The Chippendale Society.
The Paxton Secretaire was commissioned by Ninian Home (1732-95) and his wife Penelope (d.1794) for Paxton House. It formed part of several suites of mahogany furniture of an elegant, restrained style, dubbed ‘The Paxton Style’, made for the house by Thomas Chippendale and his son, Thomas Chippendale Junior.
The secretaire was made c.1774-9 of the finest ‘flame’ mahogany, with its original handles and pigeonholes for filing documents. Remarkably, the secretaire retains, not just the marbled paper drawer linings characteristic of Chippendale, but also remnants of the baize dust covers which originally protected the contents of the drawers.
The secretaire, like other pieces at Paxton House, contribute not only the history of furniture and interior design, but also the history of slavery and British colonialism. Ninian Home was the owner of two plantations on the Caribbean Island of Grenada and used the secretaire in the management of his estates, which were worked by nearly 500 enslaved people. It was subsequently used for similar purposes by Ninian’s descendants. The return of the secretaire will help the Paxton Trust embed narratives relating to the Home family’s connections to slavery within the House’s permanent interpretation.
The Paxton Secretaire was sold in 1970, prior to Paxton House becoming an Accredited Museum, and has been in private collections in the USA ever since. When the piece re-surfaced on the market in New York, the Paxton Trust launched a campaign to re-acquire it. The Paxton Trust is grateful to The National Fund for Acquisitions, the Art Fund, the Museums Association Beecroft Bequest, The Chippendale Society, and a private donor, who have generously supported the costs to acquire and conserve it. The vendors, Kevin Kleinbardt and Ahna (Hogeland) Petersen of Yew Tree House and Clinton Howell kindly reduced the sale price to support the return of the secretaire to its original home at Paxton.
Dr Fiona Salvesen Murrell, Curator of Paxton House, who led the campaign said;
‘We are thrilled to have been able to acquire the Paxton Secretaire which was part of the Home family’s collection at Paxton House for 200 years before its sale. In its own right, it is an incredibly important piece of British design with so much to tell us about life in Britain and in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century. We are looking forward to it re-joining Paxton’s outstanding Chippendale collection.’
The secretaire will be on display to the public at Paxton from the 4 June 2022.