Armchair

The displayed armchair [displayed chair, displayed sofa] comes from a furniture set purchased by Izabela Lubomirska, née Czartoryska. Since then, to this day, the set is displayed as part of the furnishings of the ground-floor apartment in the northeastern corner of the castle. The interior of the 'painted in marble' room with a bedroom, study, and bathroom (dressing room) was designed in the 1780s, during the modernisation of the Łańcut residence implemented by the last members of the Lubomirski family. After the death of Stanisław Lubomirski in 1783 and her return from travels abroad in 1791, Princess Marshal made it into a kind of a souvenir 'museum'. Under the powerful impressions from a 1787 trip to England, the suite was designed according to the latest English fashion. Inspired by the discovery of Greek vases in what was formerly ancient Etruria (Tuscany), ancient Roman ornamentation, and the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, English classicism was distinguished by its lightness and elegance. Simple clear shapes were used in furniture-making; the structural elements were most often fully made of mahogany. It is no accident, that the furniture from the set in Łańcut, decorated with prints on the backrests, was described as 'Etruscan' in the early 19th-century inventories. The prints with allegorical and mythological themes decorating the crownings of the backrests are coloured with gouache. The fashion, called the 'Etruscan style' at the time, also known in France in the 1790s, in the time of the Directory, was a broader phenomenon in European interior architecture and furniture-making. The displayed set was made in Poland (S.440MŁ; S.441MŁ; S.442MŁ; S.443MŁ; S.444MŁ; S.2320MŁ; S.2321MŁ). Originally, the furniture was upholstered with black fabric decorated with orange silk embroidered flowers and 'people'. In the 19th century, the upholstery was replaced with a red and black diagonal stripe-patterned one that exists to this day. The furniture is displayed in the suite which was referred to as the 'Turkish Apartment' in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Teresa Bagińska-Żurawska https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9243-3968