Description:
English armchair supported by composite turned legs and a stretcher base. The elaborately-carved front stretcher is keyed to baluster-turned front posts that proceed past the thin seat frame to support carved outward curving arm rests, which are mortised into the off-set turned rear stiles framing a pierced splat and surmounted by a carved crest rail with projecting ears. The chair is adaptation - an English armchair with a cane back and molded arch crest rail, made in the late seventeenth century, which was modernized a hundred years later. English-made cane chairs are notoriously fragile; few have survived with their turned elements entirely intact. Either in an effort to repair damage to the back or give the chair a new look, the owner retained the old-style decoratively turned arms, legs, and carved stretchers below the seat, but added an upholstered slip seat, new birch stay rail, splat, and crest. The resulting hybrid melds the William and Mary and Rococo styles. The chair is significant for its "modernization" and particularly because it is one of perhaps a dozen armchairs probably owned by Sanuel Wyllys (1632-1709) of Hartford, Connecticut (see the "Family Genealogical Record" [62.182.1] for detailed information on the Wylly and related families). The original set of chairs descended through the family until 1827, when the Wyllys family possessions were sold and the chairs went to auction with the rest of the household furnishings. Since antiquarian interest in the set of chairs remained after the style had gone out of fashion, one was bought by Daniel Wadsworth, patron of Hartford's Atheneum, to be used as a prototype to make a dozen reproductions, the earliest known copies of American-made or owned furniture of the colonial period.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+95.033 |
