PLYMOUTH COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS, 1715-1730

Displaying turnings executed in the "Tinkham" manner, this great chair probably represents the work of an early eighteenth-century turner in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. As Robert F. Trent and Karin Goldstein have recently demonstrated, Ephraim Tinkham II (1649-1713) was a second-generation craftsman who adapted the designs of Dutch prototypes in late seventeenth-century Plymouth. With its variant finials and plain-turned "stepped-in pillar" posts, this chair relates to two others that are attributed to a maker working after Tinkham's death in 1713 (Trent and Goldstein, "Notes about New 'Tinkham' Chairs," American Furniture (1998), pp. 215-237, cats. 23 and 24).