CHESS: Irish artist Graham Knuttel has teamed up with Viscount Linley - cabinet-making nephew of Queen Elizabeth - to make 12 chess sets, each costing €96,000. Louise East meets the pair in London.
They make an odd couple, Viscount Linley and Graham Knuttel: the cabinet-making nephew of H. M. the Queen and the Irish artist renowned for his paintings of night owls and lounge lizards. Yet over the past year, the pair have collaborated on the Taj Mahal (or perhaps the Trump Towers) of chess sets: a glossy walnut table, nearly a metre square, with pieces cast from Irish silver, weighing some 52 kilos in total.
The haughty kings and leering queens are clearly the work of Knuttel, while Linley's contribution is the table, rich with sycamore and Bombay rosewood inlays. If you fancy getting your hands on one, you should know they're in a limited edition of 12. You should also know they come with a price tag of €96,000.
"The chess tables are very accessible and affordable," says David Linley, with ne'er a hint of irony. "They're enjoyable to live with, and they work. It's living with art and using it for a purpose."
Between them, they have reason enough to be confident their A-list chess sets are going to sell. Owners of Knuttel's work include Frank Sinatra, Robert de Niro, Eddie Jordan and Bertie Ahern, not to mention countless Dublin restaurants, while furniture made by Linley's eponymous, London-based company can be found in the homes of Mick Jagger and Elton John, and in the board room of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Clearly, Linley can get through doors closed to others; with one eyebrow firmly raised, he points out that a games table he recently designed for Harewood House in Yorkshire made him the first commissioned cabinet-maker there since Thomas Chippendale.
The idea for this particular table, though, was Knuttel's. "I've always been interested in what I'd call pageantry. I started out as a wood sculptor, but when I left college, I found it very hard to make a living, so I used to draw an awful lot, and what I used to draw was medieval fairs, and jousting. For years after that I was painting, but when I went back to sculpting, I was making bronzes of horses, kings, queens. It suggested to me I should make a chess set."
Casting around for someone who could make a suitably theatrical table, he remembered the workshop he looked out on from his studio in London's New Kings Road some 20 years ago. The name above the door was David Linley. He contacted Linley through designer Louise Kennedy, who stocks Linley accessories in her Merrion Square shop, and for some months, designs and ideas flew back and forth between Knuttel, and Linley's managing director, Ruth Kennedy (no relation to Louise).
Linley takes up the tale. "I met Graham for the first time when we sat around this table and talked about the designs; what could be changed and what we liked and disliked. It was a very collaborative process, and very honest."
"For me," Knuttel says, "there was a benefit because I work in what would appear to be a very undisciplined way, smashing around with paint all day, but when I had to work with David, I had to really discipline myself."
One of the chess tables will be part of an exhibition of Knuttel's new work, which also includes tapestries made up in Aubusson to his designs, and paintings. The subject matter, he says, is real animals rather than party animals. "Because I've been working with tapestry, the imagery is much softer. But I do still love painting that seedy underground world."
Linley, who heads a team of 39 staff turning out polished and highly priced furniture, all hand-made in his workshops in Yorkshire, professes himself similarly delighted with the collaboration process.
"We enjoy working with artists because you actually learn something and you benefit from the experience. I don't think we would have proposed something as extraordinary as this."
When asked whether the chronicler of "seedy underground" had taken the aristocratic cabinet-maker out on the tear in Dublin, they both protest, perhaps a little too much.
"I don't go out on the town," says Knuttel. "I've been to that Lillie's place twice in my life and I live opposite Renard's nightclub and I've been there three times this year."
"And I've got two children so I go to bed at half past nine. I'm knackered," says Linley indignantly.
Well perhaps the pair could sit down and play a game of chess on their completed masterpiece? They both look a little sheepish.
"Eh, I can play draughts," offers Linley.
"I play that as well," agrees Knuttel.
Graham Knuttel's exhibition runs from November 8th to 11th at his studio in South Frederick Street, Dublin. Apply for invitations on www.knuttel.com