Lot Essay
With their pierced, vase-shaped splats surmounted by an open quatrefoil, these chairs suggest the stylistic influence of Gothic designs as presented by eighteenth-century English pattern books. Their dynamic serpentine crest and front seat rails, through tenoned construction, chamfered rear legs, and modified trifid feet, demonstrate classic elements of Philadelphia Chippendale craftmanship. The use of New England-style triangular corner blocks and the shallow knee carving, however, suggest the influence of a geographical crosscurrent in their manufacture. The distinctive flat foliate knee carving centered by cross-hatching is related in design to carved knees found on a group of chairs produced in New York. One is in the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery and is illustrated in John T. Kirk, American Chairs (New York, 1972), p.120, pl.143, and detail fig. 35, p.47. Another chair bearing similar carving is in the collection of the Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, and is illustrated in Charles F. Hummel, American Chippendale Furniture: Middle Atlantic and Southern Colonies (New York, 1976), p.21, fig. 6.