Open to the public virtually and actually engenders response, consequently, from distant quarters, as my last blog entry did. One of my closest friends, an English gentleman, took exception to what he took to be my denigration of London as an 18th century style centre, or more accurately, my favorable characterization of Paris. Well, this would be an irritant since, as my gentle friend has so often told me, the French are the traditional enemies of the English. I hadn’t realized how recent the battle of Agincourt actually was. Fresh in English consciousness, at any rate.
This, of course, put me in mind of English nationalism expressed in material form in, you guessed it, the chair. Ironic, too, that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Napoleonic Wars would be a crucial vector for design motifs. With the classical world of Greece and Rome providing a framework for design in the last quarter of the 18th century, antiquarianism spread a bit further to the south toward the end and beginning of the century following, with the motifs of ancient Egypt becoming particularly fashionable. It is a bit tidier to presume that busy designers like George Smith, and more famously Thomas Hope were at work popularizing lion’s 
head monopedia, but a more immediate cause was Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign that terminated with Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.
I don’t know of too very many events in history met as ecstatically as Nelson’s Nile victory, but it is dwarfed by the public acclaim the result of Nelson’s subsequent victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. All things Nelson became a mania in England, with the victory instantly incorporated into chairs with the use of a rope twist motif, emblematic of Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS ‘Victory’.