PHILADELPHIA, 1740-1760

This armchair is seen at the foot of a four-poster bed in a 1932 photograph of “Guest Room No. III” in Blairhame, the Tuxedo Park home of Mrs. J. Insley Blair. See Christie’s, New York, Property from the Collection of Mrs. J. Insley Blair, 21 January 2006, p. 23, fig. 15. The chair may also be the item described by Mrs. Blair as a “Curly Maple Armchair. High yoke back. Scroll arms. Snake feet. H. Stretcher. Penn.” in an inventory she took of her collection in 1943. If this entry does refer to the chair offered here, Mrs. Blair’s notes indicate that she purchased it in November 1920 from Mrs. E. B. Willets of Brooklyn for $400. At the time of the inventory, the chair was in the dining room of “the cottage,” a smaller house on the Blairhame estate where Mrs. Blair lived after she closed the main house after her husband’s death in 1939.