Description:
One of a pair of side chairs with rectangular crest rails relieved with interlocked, carved cornucopia, which curve backward in the Empire style, over lyre splats suspended between reeded rear stiles which descend into reeded side seat rails and front saber legs. The attribution to the shop of Duncan Phyfe (1770-1854) is based on surviving documented examples and a sketch attributed to Duncan Phyfe, which was found with a bill of sale that Phyfe sent to Charles N. Bancker in 1816 of two chairs, one of which is similar to this pair. These chairs are a good example of the regency style in America, and the lyre design illustrates one of the many decorative options installed in chairs of this type. George Alfred Cluett (1873-1955), of Troy, New York, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, collected American furniture from around 1901, shortly after he and Edith Tucker were married, through the mid-1920s. Cluett was prominent among early collectors. For the first museum exhibition of American furniture, The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, Cluett loaned 22 objects. Cluett, whose family business became Arrow Shirts, finished collecting before Henry Francis DuPont began to amass objects for what became the core of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The Cluett family donated most of its collection to Historic Deerfield beginning in 1960, with its last gifts given in 2003. Cluett’s keen connoisseurship, focused on Classical objects (contemporary to his grandparents’ lives) is notable as he collected before the publication of the first seminal reference books on American antiques. Moreover, the early twentieth-century collectors focused on the so-called Pilgrim Century, which predates the Classical era by over one hundred years. Cluett was particularly intrigued by the work of craftsmen including Seymour, McIntire, Phyfe, and Lannuier. Cluett’s desire for privacy, and reverence for times past has long obscured his creative connoisseurship and legacy as one of the earliest and influential collectors of American furniture.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+85.014 |
