BOSTON, 1740-1760

Purchased a few months after the chest-of-drawers in lot 178, this side chair represents, in Joseph K. Ott's words, the "serious beginnings" of his furniture collection. Ironically, both these pieces were made in Massachusetts but unlike the chest, this side chair was purchased as and long thought to be a Rhode Island-made form. It is among a large body of chairs previously assigned to Newport or New York that were reattributed to Boston by Leigh Keno, Joan Barzilay Freund and Alan Miller in their study of Boston chairs and their export. Distinguished by its carved shell on the crest, compass seat, shell-carved knees and ball-and-claw feet, this chair was a more elaborate and more expensive version of a basic walnut model priced at twenty six shillings in the accounts of Samuel Grant from the early 1730s (Joseph K. Ott, "Some Rhode Island Furniture," The Magazine Antiques (May 1975), pp. 940, 941; Joan Barzilay Freund and Leigh Keno, "The Making and Marketing of Boston Seating Furniture in the Late Baroque Style,"American Furniture 1998, Luke Beckerdite, ed. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1998), p. 24; see also Leigh Keno, Joan Barzilay Freund and Alan Miller, "'The Very Pink of the Mode': Boston Georgian Chairs, Their Export, and Their Influence," American Furniture 1996, Luke Beckerdite, ed. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1996), pp. 266-306).