A pair of Egyptian Revival 'Thebes' three-legged stools, to a design attributed to Leonard Wyburd for Liberty & Co., London, c.1894. oak with highly figured grain, concave seat raised on three flaring legs. Height 400., Thebes stool designs were inspired by furniture and paintings unearthed from royal tombs in the ancient Egyptian city for which they are named. Leonard Wyburd, who was one of the principal designers for Liberty, patented his designs for the stools in 1884. Liberty continued to make the popular stools into the early 1900s, whilst the Austrian architect Adolf Loos produced variants for his Villa Duschnitz interior.
- Attributed - A cataloguing term where the item in the opinion of the cataloguers, is a of the period of the artist, craftsman or designer, and which probably in whole or part is the work of that person.
- Oak - Native to Europe and England, oak has been used for joinery, furniture and building since the beginning of the medieval civilisation. It is a pale yellow in colour when freshly cut and darkens with age to a mid brown colour.
Oak as a furniture timber was superceded by walnut in the 17th century, and in the 18th century by mahogany,
Semi-fossilised bog oak is black in colour, and is found in peat bogs where the trees have fallen and been preserved from decay by the bog. It is used for jewellery and small carved trinkets.
Pollard oak is taken from an oak that has been regularly pollarded, that is the upper branches have been removed at the top of the trunk, result that new branches would appear, and over time the top would become ball-like. . When harvested and sawn, the timber displays a continuous surface of knotty circles. The timber was scarce and expensive and was used in more expensive pieces of furniture in the Regency and Victorian periods.
- Figured - A descriptive term to describe the patterns in the grain of timber. An object may be described as "well figured" or "highly figured" if the grain on a section of the object is highly patterned, as with flame mahogany or burr walnut.
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