Description:
Great chair with a paneled seat, which according to Benno Forman in American Seating Furniture 1630-1730 (Winterthur Museum, 1988) is the only known seventeenth-century American slat-back chair with a two-section board seat (chestnut and eastern white pine). The chair illustrates the best turned seating furniture made in New York City toward the close of the seventeenth century. Forman thought that it was made by the same school of turners that made the Stryker family chair from Suffolk, Massachusetts, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and related to a similarly-turned chair in The Connecticut Historical Society. Probably fitted originally with a squab and with detached wooden rings around the arm supports, the chair assumed a throne-like appearance that underscored the hierarchy of the household. The chair has very heavy uprights, with the round back posts topped with knob-like finials over double discs that continue into round legs ending in deeply scored feet; three flat-topped slats, which have early cutout corners, but have been probably replaced; plain turned arms; mushroom handgrips over scored turnings on the front posts ending in rounded, deeply scored feet; plain wooden seat with an upholstered cushion (58.050A); and plain turned, double stretchers on the front and sides. The chair was originally painted lamp-black, which has been removed.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+58.050 |
