Side Chair
Period1730 - 1760
MediumMaple, and birch
Dimensions40.25 × 21.5 × 17.75 in. (102.2 × 54.6 × 45.1 cm)
Inscribed"Property / Mrs. J. A. Haskell" branded into the bottom of the rear seat rail. Numbered "IIII" on the top edge of the front seat rail. A pencil inscription on the slip seat frame reads, "Wm. Weymouth."
ClassificationsSeating Furniture
Credit LineGift of Mrs. Samuel T. Guilford in memory of Samuel Townsend Guilford, 1945
Object number2039
DescriptionA Queen Anne style side chair with a rounded yoke or saddle shaped crest rail, solid vase shaped splat, scalloped front seat rail, and shaped side seat rails. Front cabriole legs end in pad feet, while the rear legs are chamfered and raked to the rear. The legs are braced with turned stretchers forming an "H" shaped assembly, and an additional turned rear stretcher. The chair retains some areas of its original dark colored finish.Curatorial RemarksThe rapid evolution of this chair form in the Boston chairmaking trade can be followed in the accounts of Samuel Grant, a Boston upholsterer and merchant. He first described "horsebone feet" or cabriole legs in November 1730. Reference to "cushion" or loose seats followed the next October. By January 1732, Grant was selling maple chair frames with horsebone "round" feet and leather cushion seats, which this example may well have had as its first upholstery. The crook back, also a feature of this chair, had been introduced in Boston by the early 1720s. Visual corroboration of the so-called Queen Anne style in Boston around 1730 occurs in a 1732 portrait of Mrs. Andrew Oliver and her young son painted by artist John Smibert. Mrs. Oliver sits in a chair with a vase-shaped splat and a slightly raised crest rail that is related to this example. Grant produced more than 2,000 chairs during the 1730s, increasingly in the new fashioned, loose seat, cabriole leg style with the distinctive saddled crest and vase back. Many of these chairs were exported by Grant and others to markets along the east coast, where local chairmakers sought to compete by copying the form. For two examples from the New York area, see accession numbers 1144 and 1977.3.4, and for one from Philadelphia, see number 1938. For further information on the business of Samuel Grant and his master Thomas Fitch, see Brock Jobe, "The Boston Furniture Industry, 1720 - 1740," in Walter Muir Whitehill, ed., Boston Furniiture of the Eighteenth Century (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts,1974), 3 - 48. See also Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Wilmington: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 14 - 20.NotesA tag tacked to the inside surface of the right seat rail reads, "Chair bought from C. R. Morson / Queen Anne." Charles R. Morson (1870 - 1929) was a leading antiques dealer in New York City. The back of this chair was at one time upholstered.
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