.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Embellished with urbane designs from England, this side chair is among the more sophisticated examples of Boston seating furniture from the 1730s and 1740s. The rounded stiles, slender vasiform splat and robust eagle's claw feet were derived from Chinese sources and transmitted to America via the import of English chairs. Other decorative details, such as the lambrequin carving and C-scrolls on the front legs and, highly unusual in an American context, cabriole shaping to the rear legs, are also found on English forms. Such chairs were made from the late 1730s to 1750 and the presence of lambrequin-decorated legs can be documented to Boston in John Singleton Copley's 1758 portrait of John Barrett (fig. 1) (Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur (Winterthur, DE, 1997), pp. 28-29; Joan Barzilay Freund and Leigh Keno, "The Making and Marketing of Boston Seating Furniture in the Late Baroque Style," American Furniture 1998 (Milwaukee, WI, 1998), pp. 27-29).
Several chairs of seemingly identical design are known and, displaying a numbering system with no repeats, they may all have been made as part of the same original set. Marked XII, a chair at Winterthur indicates that the set comprised at least twelve chairs (Richards and Evans, pp. 28-29, cat. 15). Other examples include a pair marked IX and possibly IIII (Sotheby's New York, January 18, 1998, lot 1744).
Several chairs of seemingly identical design are known and, displaying a numbering system with no repeats, they may all have been made as part of the same original set. Marked XII, a chair at Winterthur indicates that the set comprised at least twelve chairs (Richards and Evans, pp. 28-29, cat. 15). Other examples include a pair marked IX and possibly IIII (Sotheby's New York, January 18, 1998, lot 1744).