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Lot Essay
The survival of four decades of business ledgers from the shop of Samuel Grant has provided scholars with valuable insight into the career of an enormously successful upholsterer working in eighteenth century Boston. Grant's operation produced covers for chairs, tables, and desks, coordinated the hanging of wallpaper and completely outfitted high post beds, a task that required the skills of a chairmaker, carver, sailmaker, journeyman upholsterer, and a seamstress. During the early years of his career, he sold large quantities of "Boston Chairs," of maple and black leather that he shipped up and down the coast and the West Indies. By the 1730s and 40s however, he began to diversify, offering his clients a host of choices including compass seats, ball-and-claw feet and Marlborough legs (Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era, Boston, 1984, p.11, 44).
The chair offered here was probably made around 1735. The high arched back and true balloon seat with serpentine side rails, and the profile and position of the medial stretcher, are features associated with chairs made in Boston of this early date (for a related example, see American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, vol.5, p.1211, fig. P4156). Grant's ledgers record the first sale of a "compass seat" in 1732 (Jobe and Kaye, p.11). With these characteristics, the easy chair offered here, pre-dates the Jonathan Sayward chair in the collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. The SPLIA chair was made by George Bright or Clement Vincent, and is documented in Grant's ledger of August 1759 (illustrated and discussed in Jobe and Kaye, p.362-4). For more on Samuel Grant see Jobe, "The Boston Upholstery Trade, 1700-1775," in Cooke, ed., American & Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, New York, 1987, p.65-89.
The chair offered here was probably made around 1735. The high arched back and true balloon seat with serpentine side rails, and the profile and position of the medial stretcher, are features associated with chairs made in Boston of this early date (for a related example, see American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, vol.5, p.1211, fig. P4156). Grant's ledgers record the first sale of a "compass seat" in 1732 (Jobe and Kaye, p.11). With these characteristics, the easy chair offered here, pre-dates the Jonathan Sayward chair in the collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. The SPLIA chair was made by George Bright or Clement Vincent, and is documented in Grant's ledger of August 1759 (illustrated and discussed in Jobe and Kaye, p.362-4). For more on Samuel Grant see Jobe, "The Boston Upholstery Trade, 1700-1775," in Cooke, ed., American & Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, New York, 1987, p.65-89.