What does 6+2 mean in a chair listing?

It's set notation: six side chairs plus two carvers, the carvers being the armchairs. You'll also see 8+2 and "10 plus 2 carvers" written out in full. The notation recurs through the upper half of the range, because sets with carvers sit above sets without.

Are these 18th century or later copies?

Both, in roughly equal measure. Titles divide almost evenly between chairs called period or Georgian and chairs called style, design, manner, taste or revival. Dealer-entered dates run from 1750 to 1930, and the decade buckets cluster heavily around the revival: the 1900s, 1920s, 1890s and 1880s all carry substantial numbers. A century label alone rarely tells you which end of that 180-year span a chair sits at.

Which timber is most common?

Mahogany, by a wide margin. It's named in 603 of 1,030 titles, and "mahogany dining" alone accounts for 130. Oak, elm, walnut, fruitwood, satinwood, rosewood and japanned or painted finishes all appear, but in small numbers. The country listings are where the native timbers gather.

How large do the sets get?

Past the domestic norm. Beyond the usual sixes and eights, the archive holds sets of ten, twelve and fourteen, and one set of twenty-one. Those larger sets occupy the highest sampled prices. Fours are common too, and singles and pairs are the most frequent form after dining sets.

What is a Gainsborough chair?

A broad upholstered open armchair with padded arms. The term appears in 36 titles, eighteen of them as "mahogany gainsborough". It shows up repeatedly among the highest-priced examples, alongside library and wing armchairs.

How often do these come up for sale?

Around 103 come to market in a year on Sellingantiques, and 203 different dealers have listed them. That makes it one of the widely traded chair patterns on the site, which is why set sizes, timbers and period claims vary as much as they do.

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Antique Chippendale Chairs

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English chairs carved in an 18th-century London pattern-book idiom, pierced or ladder splat backs on square or cabriole legs, made for dining rooms, libraries and studies over nearly two centuries.