Ralph Grynder

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Ralph Grynder or Grinder (died 1654) was a London-based furniture maker and upholsterer who worked for Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria. He bought and sold art treasures from the Royal Collection in 1651.[1]

Career[edit]

Portrait of a lady circa 1619, with sofa and canopy, Dunham Massey, National Trust

Grynder was an apprentice of the Draper's Company in 1605. Later, he lived and worked at the sign of the Lion in the Poultry, London.[2] Upholsterers supplied new furniture to aristocrat's houses and were the major figures in interior decoration.[3] Grynder and other tradesmen were questioned in the Court of Chancery about the possessions of William Cecil, 16th Baron Ros in 1617.[4]

He worked with the silkman Benjamin Henshawe in the 1620s, making beds, couches, chairs, and cushions.[5] When Henrietta Maria came to England in 1625 as the bride of Charles I, she was accompanied by the Duke and Duchess of Chevreuse.[6] Their lodgings were furnished with pieces hired from Grynder.[7]

Grynder supplied green cotton matting and 2,000 black tacks to cover the floor of a room at Somerset House for a masque in 1626 which involved a performance by Jeffrey Hudson.[8] He also features as a supplier in later accounts for Henrietta Maria's masques and pastorals.[9]

In 1628, Grynder was asked to appraise the inventory of the Jesuit College in Clerkenwell, London. The inventory was taken by Justinian Povey, a royal auditor, and George Longe.[10]

He made couches for Henrietta Maria in the 1630s and these were supplied with suites of matching chairs and stools with a canopy suspended above. These commissions can be associated with the surviving Knole sofa.[11] Grynder's bills include:

For making a lardge couch bedd of figured velvett with two heades the seat being fitted on with staples and garnished round with fringes & ovr. styles and feete, £3-0-0.
For workmanship in making a Lardge Couch chayre of brancht velvett being covered all over on rayles styles and feete with 2 cushion winges garnished with silver fringes, £4-0-0.[12]

Grynder may have worked with the joiner Charles Goodliere.[13] Other furniture makers and suppliers to court circles at this time include John Baker and Oliver Browne. Some furniture was painted by the sergeant painter John de Critz or specialists like Thomas Capp, and the gilder Philip Bromefield.[14][15]

Grynder acquired the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson in a landscape by Daniel Mytens

Grynder provided a fringe of "Turkey orange of worsted" for the bed curtains of the bed of Little Sarah, a servant of Henrietta Maria, and a bed with a "round French canopy" for Jeffrey Hudson. In 1632, his two workmen were employed at Somerset House putting up a bed.[16] He supplied "French chairs" to the Queen's House at Greenwich in 1637, upholstered with figured velvet and silver fringes,[17] and used trimmings supplied by William Geere.[18]

He worked for the Earl of Antrim and his wife, Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham, in 1638 and 1639. They owed him £761-18s.[19] An inventory of their furniture from Dunluce Castle includes couches and beds possibly supplied by Grynder. Furniture for Duchess in previous years was supplied by her wardrobe keeper Thomas Lovett.[20] Their debt to Grynder remained outstanding, and in 1660, Mary Grinder, probably his widow, signed a joint petition for payment.[21] His first wife, Anne Grinder, had committed suicide in 1626 after losing her child. She was buried at St Stephen Coleman Street.[22]

Grynder's dividend[edit]

During the sales of the royal collection, in 1651, Grynder formed a syndicate or "dividend" with nine other speculators to buy artworks.[23] He acquired paintings of eleven emperors on horseback made by the workshop of Giulio Romano for the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.[24][25] Other items bought by Grynder's dividend included portraits of Jeffrey Hudson and Mary, Queen of Scots, by Daniël Mijtens and a ten-piece suite of tapestry of the Old and New Law which had belonged to Catherine of Aragon.[26][27]

According to notes made by Richard Symonds, most of the dividend's pictures were kept at the house of Sir Peter Richards. Lord Savile bought a Madonna on a wooden panel for £250 which was too large to easily transport. It was said that the Earl of Pembroke had offered the late king £1000 for the painting,[28] which was described in another list as the "Great Piece of the Nativity done by Julio".[29]

The dividend also bought statues from the gardens of Whitehall Palace, including a life-size "Sabina fugitiva" for £600, a brass "Comedus" for £200, with a "Mercury" and a "Sleeping Cupid", both £6.[30] Drawings exist in the Royal Collection of several of these sculptures: the "Sabina" resembles a classical type of a daughter of Niobe.[31] These pieces had been brought from the collection of Vincenzo II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua by Daniel Nys and Nicholas Lanier.[32] Grynder acquired a suite of four paintings of the Labours of Hercules by Guido Reni which Nys had brought from Mantua, and these are now in the Louvre.[33]

Grynder was a warden of the Draper's Company in 1653.[34] He died in 1654. The Sabina was recovered for the Royal Collection at the Restoration by Colonel William Hawley, who received a fee of 20% of the value of each item. Hawley was a member of a committee which met at Somerset House to interview those who knew the whereabouts of royal art, including George Geldorp, John Michael Wright, and Edward Marshall.[35]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Geoffrey Beard, Upholsterers and Interior Furnishing in England, 1530–1840 (London, 1997), pp. 60–62.
  2. ^ J. J. Cartwright, 'Pictures of Charles I', The Academy (18 April 1874), p. 442 citing BL Egerton MS 1636.
  3. ^ Peter Thornton, Seventeenth Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (Yale, 1978), pp. 100–103.
  4. ^ Johanna Luthman, Family and Feuding at the Court of James I: The Lake and Cecil Scandals (Oxford, 2023), p. 82: TNA C 8/32/151.
  5. ^ Annabel Westman, Fringe Frog & Tassel: The Art of the Trimmings-Maker in Interior Decoration in Britain and Ireland (London: Philip Wilson, 2019), p. 20.
  6. ^ Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 236, 241.
  7. ^ Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2005), p. 222.
  8. ^ John H. Astington, English Court Theatre, 1558–1642 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 95: Bernard Quaritch's Catalogue, 253 (November 1906), p. 5
  9. ^ Barbara Ravelhofer, 'Bureaucrats and Courtly Cross-Dressers in the "Shrovetide Masque" and "The Shepherd's Paradise"', English Literary Renaissance, 29:1 (Winter 1999), pp. 81, 83.
  10. ^ John Gough Nichols, 'The Discovery of the Jesuits' College at Clerkenwell', The Camden Miscellany, 2 (London: Camden Society, 1853), pp. 54–57.
  11. ^ Christopher Rowell, 'A Set of Early Seventeenth-Century Crimson Velvet Seat Furniture at Knole: New Light on the Knole Sofa', Furniture History, 42 (2006), p. 30.
  12. ^ Christopher Rowell, 'A Set of Early Seventeenth-Century Crimson Velvet Seat Furniture at Knole: New Light on the Knole Sofa', Furniture History, 42 (2006), pp. 30–31.
  13. ^ Simon Jervis, 'Furniture in the Commonwealth Inventories', Arthur MacGregor, The late king's goods : collections, possessions, and patronage of Charles I in the light of the Commonwealth sale inventories (London and Oxford, 1989), p. 305 fn. 160, 164.
  14. ^ Edward Town, 'A Biographical Dictionary of London Painters, 1547–1625', Walpole Society, 76 (London, 2014), p. 51: Edward Town & Olivia Fryman, 'A rich inheritance: Lionel Cranfield's legacy at Knole', National Trust Historic Houses and Collections Annual, Apollo (2016), pp. 35–37
  15. ^ James Yorke, 'Royal Painted Furniture in Charles I's England', Valerie Dorge & F. Carey Howlett, Painted Wood: History and Conservation (Getty, 1998), pp. 120–27
  16. ^ Annabel Westman, Fringe Frog & Tassel: The Art of the Trimmings-Maker in Interior Decoration in Britain and Ireland (London: Philip Wilson, 2019), pp. 37, 250 fn. 79: Caroline Hibbard, 'The Queen's Patronage', Erin Griffey, Henrietta Maria (Ashgate, 2008), p. 132.
  17. ^ Adam Bowett, English Furniture, 1660-1714: From Charles II to Queen Anne (London, 2002), p. 69.
  18. ^ Annabel Westman, Fringe Frog & Tassel: The Art of the Trimmings-Maker in Interior Decoration in Britain and Ireland (London: Philip Wilson, 2019), p. 30.
  19. ^ George Hill, An Historical Account of the Macdonnells of Antrim (Belfast, 1873), p. 475.
  20. ^ Hector MacDonnell, 'A Seventeenth Century Inventory from Dunluce Castle, County Antrim', The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 122 (1992), pp. 109–127: Megan Shaw, 'The Duchess of Buckingham's Furniture at York House', Furniture History, 58 (2022), pp. 3, 11, 20.
  21. ^ Robert Pentland Mahaffy, Calendar of the State Papers relating to Ireland, 1660–1662 (London: HMSO, 1905), no. 212.
  22. ^ Paul S. Seaver, 'Suicide and the Vicar General in London', Jeffrey Watt, From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe (Cornell, 2004), pp. 32, 199.
  23. ^ Jonathan Brown, Kings & Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Yale, 1995), p. 81.
  24. ^ Mary Beard, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Princeton, 2021), p. 176.
  25. ^ The Emperor Otto on Horseback: RCIN 404729
  26. ^ Oliver Millar, 'The Inventories and Valuations of the King's Goods, 1649–1651', The Volume of the Walpole Society, 43 (1970–1972), pp. 69, 207, 270: Charlotte C. Stopes, 'Daniel Mytens in England', Burlington Magazine, 17:87 (June 1910), p. 162,
  27. ^ Jeffrey Hudson (1619-1682): RCIN 402815
  28. ^ J. J. Cartwright, 'Pictures of Charles I', The Academy (18 April 1874), p. 442 citing BL Egerton MS 1636: Mary Beal, A Study of Richard Symonds: His Italian Notebooks and their Relevance to Seventeenth-Century Painting Techniques (New York, 1984), p. 307.
  29. ^ Oliver Millar, 'The Inventories and Valuations of the King's Goods, 1649–1651', The Volume of the Walpole Society, 43 (1970–1972), pp. xxi, 72.
  30. ^ HMC 7th Report: House of Lords (London, 1879), pp. 90, 92.
  31. ^ Four Antique Statues, RCIN 908912, including the Sabina
  32. ^ Aydua H. Scott-Elliot, 'The Statues from Mantua in the Collection of King Charles I', The Burlington Magazine, 101:675 (June 1959), pp. 218–227: RCINs 908861-908927.
  33. ^ Jonathan Brown, Kings & Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Yale, 1995), pp. 42, 74.
  34. ^ Arthur Henry Johnson, The history of the Worshipful Company of the drapers of London (London, 1914), p. 421.
  35. ^ David Howarth, 'Charles I, Sculpture and Sculptures', Arthur MacGregor, The late king's goods : collections, possessions, and patronage of Charles I in the light of the Commonwealth sale inventories (London and Oxford, 1989), p. 108.

External links[edit]

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