Upholstered armchairs have long been one of the most desirable and most commonly faked seating forms. The dealer who sold the Stones the chair on the left claimed that it was made in Boston and was "one of the finest of this type we have seen." However, the chair dates from the mid-twentieth century and has frame components that were salvaged from an early nineteenth-century lolling chair—probably an antique that already was severely damaged. Dozens of similar fakes, most with tall backs and either claw-and-ball or pad feet, have appeared on the market during the past eighty years, and many remain undetected in important public and private collections.

A first clue to the chair’s dubious origins is that upholstered armchairs were not commonly produced in colonial America. Fakers take advantage of collectors’ desire to own extremely "rare" furniture forms, including upholstered armchairs like the one on the far right. This piece is constructed with parts from an authentic lolling chair, such as the example on the right. A second clue that the chair is a fake is its relative lack of design sophistication, due in large part to the strange merging of Boston-style legs with Delaware Valley-style arms.

While the maker of the fake chair awkwardly combined designs from two different regions and time periods, eighteenth century Boston chairmakers typically followed British precedent in the design and construction of most upholstered seating forms. With its low back and serpentine crest, this rare American example—with its upholstery removed for examination—is a Boston version of a "French chair." The eighteenth-century furniture designer Thomas Chippendale noted that the carved decoration on French chairs of this sort "may be lessened without detriment to the design."