Sebastian Pryke has recently identified a rare form of distinctively Scottish furniture. He tells the story of this little-known group and its likely association with a remarkable early-18thcentury craftswoman.
WHEN Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, one of the shining lights of the early Scottish enlightenment, was furnishing his family’s lodgings in Edinburgh in the 1720s, he turned to his immediate neighbour, the cabinetmaker and builder George Riddell, who lived in the same close off the Royal Mile now known as Riddle’s Court.
The inhabitants of Edinburgh dwelt cheek by jowl, mostly in what we would recognise today as flats accessed off shared (‘common’) stairs, with the classes often literally separated hierarchically from bottom to top, rather than occupying different areas of the city.
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