1. Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture: 1630–1730 (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 288–94, 320–26. Richard H. Randall, Jr., “Boston Chairs,” Old Time New England (summer 1963): 13. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 311. Neil D. Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Disappearance and Material Life in Colonial New York,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite and William N. Hosley (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1995), pp. 191–249.

2. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 289–91.

3. The preferred leather was “russia” leather, tanned near St. Petersburg and exported to the colonies by London merchants. The leather was cross-hatched and dyed red. For more on russia leather, see Geoff Garbett and Ian Skelton, The Wreck of the Meta Catharina (Redruth, England: St. George Printing Works, Ltd., 1987), pp. 23–42; Robert F. Trent, “17th Century Upholstery in Massachusetts,” in Upholstery in America & Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, edited by Edward S. Cooke, Jr. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987), pp. 39–50; and Brock Jobe, “The Boston Upholstery Trade,” in Cooke, ed., Upholstery in America & Europe, pp. 69–71. In colonial terminology, an upholstery “nail” referred to a brass-headed fastener and a “tack” to an iron fastener. For more on stuffing materials, see Trent, “17th Century Upholstery in Massachusetts,” p. 39; and Jobe, “The Boston Upholstery Trade,” p. 78. The grass on this example is probably Distichlis spicata, or spike grass.

4. Forman cited these characteristics and noted that the cylindrical turnings above the seat “are invariably scored about 3/8” (1cm) from their ends” (Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 290).

5. For examples of Boston easy chairs, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 363, 367; advertisement by John Walton, Inc., Antiques 120, no. 2 (August 1981): 206. Roger Gonzales first recognized the “Boston” stretcher. He also developed the chronological framework for the Boston seating presented here and was the first to observe the distinctive stylistic and structural details of the New York chairs illustrated in figs. 19, 20, and 23.

6. For an excellent discussion of seventeenth-century, Boston low-back chairs, see Trent, “17th-Century Upholstery,” p. 39. Forman discusses the connections between New York and Boston chairs in American Seating Furniture, pp. 292–93.

7. The Cane-Chair Makers Company noted in 1680 that “about the year 1664, cane-chairs came into use” and were esteemed “for their Durable Lightness, and Cleanness from Dust, Worms and Moths which inseparably attend Turkey-work, serge and other stuff chairs and couches, to the spoiling of them and all furniture near them” (Peter Thornton, Seventeenth Century Interior Decoration in England, France & Holland [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978], p. 202). Gertrude Z. Thomas argues that cane chairs became fashionable shortly after the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza (Gertrude Z. Thomas, Richer than Spices [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965] p. 58). A small number of Boston leather chairs have ball-turned posts (see Herbert Cescinsky and George Leland Hunter, English and American Furniture [Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Company, 1929], p. 74). For an English leather chair with ball-turned posts, see John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 232, fig. 737. For illustrations of “crook’d back” chairs, see Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: by the Museum, 1965), pp. 165–67; Dean F. Failey, Long Island is My Nation: The Decorative Arts and Craftsmen, 1640–1830 (Setauket, N.Y.: Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1976), p. 25; and Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 333–52.

8. For references to this kind of specialization in the seventeenth century, see Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982), 2:288–89. During the 1730s, Boston turners John Underwood, Daniel McKillister, and Daniel Swan produced legs, drops, and finials for the city’s cabinetmakers (Brock Jobe, “The Boston Furniture Industry, 1720–1740,” in Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Walter Muir Whitehill, Brock Jobe, and Jonathan Fairbanks [Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974], p. 15).

9. For an English or Dutch chair with a leather back and slit crest rail, see fig. 8. A late seventeenth-century side chair with a slit, carved crest rail, hollow back, carved stretcher, and “barley-twist” front legs, stretchers, and rear posts is illustrated in Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 107. This chair reportedly descended in the Pritchard family of Milford, Connecticut. As quoted in Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 283.

10. A banister-back side chair with a “Prince of Wales” crest is illustrated in Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 317. In place of the typical leather back panel, this chair has four turned banisters that match the back posts. All of the stretchers are fully turned and inserted into holes drilled into the legs. The turned legs also attach to the seat rails in this manner, rather than having pegged mortise-and-tenon joints. The rear legs rake backward like those of second-generation Boston leather chairs.

11. Only a few quick strokes were required to plane the legs to the desired shape. The original stock had to be square so that the front leg could be turned properly. It was quicker to plane the surface with the grain rather than rip it with a saw. The angles of the three block surfaces differ slightly, indicating that they were planed separately. The construction illustrated in fig. 17 did not last long. On later “crook’d back” Boston leather chairs, the front legs are usually chamfered, like the earlier chairs, whereas the rear legs are square.

12. For seventeenth-century, English low-back armchairs with single side stretchers, see Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition, p. 221, fig. 676; and Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Woodbridge, England: Antique Collectors’ Club, Baron Publishing, 1979), p. 278. For a Boston example, see Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3:532–33.

13. For a Boston Cromwellian chair with barefaced tenons, see Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, A Cupperd, Four Joyne Stools & Other Smalle Things: The Material Culture of Plymouth Colony (Sandwich, Mass.: Heritage Plantation, 1994), p. 129, no. 137.

14. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 301, fig. 169, shows a detail of two Boston chairs with undercut blocks and reel-shaped capitals. New York chairs have more attenuated post turnings than Boston examples, but the space between the seat rail and the lower back rail is about the same. Because New York turnings occupy more of the vertical space, there is less room for the square stock of the back leg; thus, the turning shapes and size of the exposed blocks beneath them can help verify a chair’s New York origin. Similar columns appear on other examples of New York furniture (see the ca. 1700 escritoire in Marshall B. Davidson and Elizabeth Stillinger, The American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985], p. 108). The extra ball on New York stretchers is also found on turned elements of New York tables from that period. See Peter M. Kenny, “Flat Gates, Draw Bars, Twists, and Urns: New York’s Distinctive, Early Baroque Oval Tables with Falling Leaves,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1994), p. 122.

15. A second-generation “plain top’d” Boston armchair (Art Institute of Chicago, acc. 1989.57) has a rear stretcher of the same design and dimensions as that of the chair shown in fig. 25. Forman attributed the latter chair to New York even though the finial and underarm turnings are in the Boston style (Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 288). For a Boston chair with similar turnings and finials, see Kenny, “Flat Gates, Draw Bars, Twists and Urns,” p. 124, fig. 30. Kenny also illustrates several New York tables with urn and baluster turnings on pp. 115–17, figs. 19–21; p. 123, fig. 29.

16. New York’s chairmaking community was considerably more diverse than Boston’s and included artisans of English, French, and Dutch descent (see Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 321–24; and Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight”).

17. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 292, 285. As quoted in Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” p. 196. Although the New York chairs have double side stretchers like first-generation Boston chairs, the authors believe the New York examples shown in figs. 19 and 20 are contemporary with second-generation Boston ones. This would explain why the turnings on New York chairs sometimes bear more resemblance to Boston second-generation chairs.

18. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 326. The Vanderlyn chair is also attributed to New York in Robert F. Trent, “The Early Baroque in Colonial America: The William and Mary Style,” in American Furniture with Related Decorative Arts 1661–1830: The Milwaukee Art Museum and Layton Collection, edited by Gerald W. R. Ward (New York: Hudson Hill Press, 1991), pp. 68–69. For other Boston chairs with New York histories, see Joseph T. Butler, Sleepy Hollow Restorations: A Cross-Section of the Collection (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1983), p. 53; Failey, Long Island is My Nation, p. 26, fig. 23; and Roderic H. Blackburn, “Branded and Stamped New York Furniture,” Antiques 119, no. 5 (May 1981): 1131.

19. The Potwine family originated in Boston and resided briefly in Hartford before settling in Coventry, Connecticut, about 1740. There is no evidence that Thomas Potwine had any ties to New York (Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History: October, 1701-May, 1745 [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1885], pp. 265–66). Irving Whitehall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England (1891; reprint ed., Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), p. 171, fig. 69. The Yale chair is illustrated in Patricia Kane, 300 Years of Seating Furniture (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), pp. 60–61. The couch is illustrated in an advertisement by Bernard & S. Dean Levy, Inc., Antiques 125, no. 3 (March 1984): 492.

20. The chairs are discussed in the May 1994 issue of Maine Antique Digest, p. 14C. Auctioneer Ronald Bourgeault advertised a first-generation-type side chair with a Portsmouth history in the December 1984 issue of Maine Antique Digest, p. 40D. The chair has a classic “Boston” front stretcher, but the back posts and finials more closely resemble those of the chairs shown in fig. 31.

21. For more on the export of leather chairs from Boston, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 281–302; and Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight.”