NEWPORT, 1750-1770

With “beak” shaped crest ears and pierced, inverted baluster spat, these chairs illustrate a design popular in Newport during the second half of the eighteenth century. As discussed by Jennifer N. Johnson, most examples have upward scrolls on the shoulders of the splat while chairs with plain shoulders, as seen here, survive in smaller numbers. An assembled set of six chairs is closely related to the examples offered here and also display plain shoulders and circular separators in the splats with pierced holes. Two of this other set are inscribed “Brown,” indicating that they were owned by the Brown family of Providence. The distinctive shaping of the crest was employed to a lesser degree by chairmakers in other New England locales, but the medial stretchers with conical ends and side stretchers with pronounced rings near the back indicate their Newport origins (Jennifer N. Johnson, catalogue entry, in Patricia E. Kane et al., Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830 (New Haven, 2016), pp. 265, 267; for a chair of closely related design at Winterthur Museum, see Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Winterthur, 1997), pp. 62-64, cat. 35, left; for the related assembled set of six, see The Rhode Island Furniture Archive at Yale University Art Gallery, RIF655).