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Lot Essay
Exhibiting high style craftsmanship, this exceptional easy chair, with its bowed crestrail, conical-shaped arm supports, turned H-stretcher and thickly padded disc feet is quintessentially Massachusetts. For examples of similar forms see Fales, The Furniture of Historic Deerfield (New York, 1976), fig. 68 and Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston, 1984), pp. 104-106.
The most distinctive feature of this chair is its highly-cushioned pad feet with incised line embellishment. While unusual, these types of feet can be traced to Boston and Salem and are found on a slant front desk by John Cogswell as well as several other Massachusetts chairs (for the desk, see Conradsen, Useful Beauty: Early American Decorative Arts From St. Louis Collections (St. Louis, 1999), pp. 76-77; for the chairs Sack, American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, p. 678, P3250; Greenlaw, New England Furniture at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, 1974), p. 63, no. 54; Bishop, Centuries and Styles of the American Chair: 1640-1970 (New York, 1972), p. 151, fig. 184; and a set of four Sold in these Rooms, April 11, 1981, lot 500).
The most distinctive feature of this chair is its highly-cushioned pad feet with incised line embellishment. While unusual, these types of feet can be traced to Boston and Salem and are found on a slant front desk by John Cogswell as well as several other Massachusetts chairs (for the desk, see Conradsen, Useful Beauty: Early American Decorative Arts From St. Louis Collections (St. Louis, 1999), pp. 76-77; for the chairs Sack, American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, p. 678, P3250; Greenlaw, New England Furniture at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, 1974), p. 63, no. 54; Bishop, Centuries and Styles of the American Chair: 1640-1970 (New York, 1972), p. 151, fig. 184; and a set of four Sold in these Rooms, April 11, 1981, lot 500).