1. “The Country-Man’s Answer to a Letter Intitled the Distressed State of the Town of Boston Considered,” Boston News-Letter, April 14, 1720. In “A Brief Description of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof,” Samuel Maverick referred to Boston as the “Metrapolis of New England,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, 1 (1884–1885): 237. Neil D. Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Disappearance and Material Life in Colonial New York,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1995), pp. 193–96. Thomas Fitch’s letterbooks and account books are in the following collections: Letterbook, 1702–1711, New England Historic Genealogical Society; Letterbook, 1723–1733, Massachusetts Historical Society; Account book, 1719–1732, and Account Book, 1732–1736, Massachusetts Historical Society. 2. Roger Gonzales and Daniel Putnam Brown, Jr., “Boston and New York Leather Chairs: A Reappraisal,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 179–89. Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730 (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 244, 286, 313. Leigh Keno, Joan Barzilay Freund, and Alan Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode: Boston Georgian Chairs, Their Export and Their Influence,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), p. 269. Samuel Grant’s account books and receipt book are in the following collections: Account Book, 1728–1737, Massachusetts Historical Society; Receipt Book, 1731–1740, Bostonian Society; Account Book, 1737–1760, American Antiquarian Society. 3. Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode,” pp. 269–306. 4. Kamil, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” pp. 192, 196. Boston leather chairs were undoubtedly inspired by British caned chairs and leather chairs. Like their New England counterparts, British leather chairs exported to the colonies were also adaptations of London cane chairs. In 1680, the Cane-Chair Makers Company noted that “about the year 1664, cane-chairs came into use.” Such chairs 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; see also Gonzales and Brown, “Boston and New York Leather Chairs,” p. 193, nt. 7). For references to Faneuil and his shipments of leather chairs to New York and Rhode Island, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 201, 204, 208, 243–44, 261–64, 271, 281–88, 292, 294–95, 297–99, 310, 313, 316, 323, 326, 335, 337–38, 340, 348, 351–52. 5. The first reference to chairs with crooked backs and molded stiles in Fitch’s accounts is February 27, 1722/23 (Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 262). Ibid., pp. 242, 284–85, 258–67. 6. Ibid., pp. 244, 250, 258–67. 7. Samuel Grant Account Book, October 14, 1729; November 21, 1730; and January 13, 1731/32. Thomas Phill sold chairs with sawn cabriole legs, described as “frames of ye newest fashion,” to Edward Dryen of Canons Ashby in Northamptonshire in 1714 (see Nicholas Grindley, The Bended Back Chair [London: Barling, 1990]). One of the chairs from Canons Ashby is illustrated in Ralph Edwards, The Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture (London: Country Life), pp. 133, fig. 67. Edwards also illustrates another early cabriole leg chair made for Sir William Humphrey, Lord Mayor of London, about 1717 (ibid., p. 135, fig. 75). A suite of furniture possibly made for the Earls of Guilford, Sezincote, Gloucestershire, has carved details that suggest a date of production earlier than the Dryen and Humphrey suites (see Sotheby’s Important English Furniture, London, July 10, 1998, p. 28, lot 6). For chairs attributed to the Roberts family, see Christie’s, Works of Art from Houghton, London, December 8, 1994, lots 126 and 127. Two Boston side chairs with sawn cabriole legs not illustrated in this article are in a private collection in Newbury, Massachusetts. Both are made of maple and have a punched “I-”. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 286. On February 27, 1722/23, Fitch sold Edmund Knight “1 doz crook’d back chairs” for £16.4. On March 20, 1723/24, Fitch sold a dozen “Rushia newest fashion’d chairs” to Adam Powell of New York (ibid., p. 285). 8. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 301. The center stretcher on the chair shown in figure 6 is closely related to one on a Boston backstool dating about 1710–1720 and several leather chairs from the first quarter of the eighteenth century (see ibid., p. 361, no. 85). 9. Grant may have referred to backstools as “low chairs.” His account book lists “1 Crimson Chainy Easy Ch:” and “1 Low chair horse bone foot cushn seat” on January 25, 1731/32. Grant Account Book, pp. 360, 342–43. Although the history of the armchair shown in figure 9 is unknown, it resembles one that reportedly belonged to Reverend Theophilus Pickering (1700–1747), who graduated from Harvard College in 1719 and served as minister of Chebacco Parish in Ipswich, Massachusetts, from 1725 until 1747 (Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 349). For the Remey reference, see Christopher Gilbert, “The Temple Newsam Furniture Bills,” Furniture History 3 (1967): 21. 10. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 298, 358. Gonzales and Brown, “Boston and New York Leather Chairs,” pp. 175–80. 11. The other easy chairs are at the Winterthur Museum (see Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 365, no. 89), Colonial Williamsburg, and the Chipstone Foundation. The Williamsburg chair has a partially replaced crest rail and has lost its carved Spanish feet. The Chipstone chair is virtually identical to the Williamsburg chair and the example shown in figure 13, with the exception of having a double-arched crest rail. For related easy chairs, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 364–69; nos. 88–92. The low chair is illustrated in ibid., p. 361, no. 85. 12. For the Oldmixon quote, see Esther Singleton, Furniture of Our Forefathers (New York: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1908), pp. 372–73. Edmund Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (1758; reprint ed., New York: Research Reprints, 1970), 2:172–73. The Speaker’s chair made for the Virginia House of Burgesses and a small group of late baroque tables attributed to Williamsburg, Virginia, appear to date from the mid- to late 1720s (Wallace B. Gusler, The Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia, 1710–1790 [Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1979], pp. 12–19). The dining table shown in figure 9 of Gusler’s book descended in the Carter family of eastern Virginia. Oral tradition maintains that it came from King Carter’s home, Corotoman, which burned in 1728 (conversations between Luke Beckerdite and members of the Carter family during a visit to Sabine Hall in 1997). The late baroque style may have been introduced to Williamsburg by cabinetmaker Peter Scott who was established there by 1722 (Gusler, Furniture of Williamsburg, pp. 25–27). 13. Nancy Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Museum, 1997), pp. 13–14. The authors thank Alan Miller for the information on spokeshaves. 14. Boston Gazette, April 4–11, 1726. 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. 28. As quoted in Alan Miller, “Roman Gusto in New England: An Eighteenth-Century Boston Furniture Designer and His Shop,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1993), p. 162. The tally of chairs was derived from customhouse clearances posted in the Boston News-Letter and Boston Gazette. The 1735 petition is quoted in Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, 1630–1880, 4 vols. (Boston: Tickner and Co., 1886), 2:457, nt. 1. 15. The cane chair shown in figure 4 is one of the earliest Boston examples with a triple-swelled medial stretcher. Variations of this stretcher design persisted until about midcentury (see Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode,” p. 258, figs. 29, 30). Joseph K. Ott, “Abraham Redwoods Chairs?” Antiques 119, no. 3 (March 1981): 672; Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode,” p. 295; and Richards and Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur, pp. 171–73. 16. For more on the influence of Ming furniture on London seating, see Grindley, The Bended-Back Chair. The Boston desk-and-bookcase is illustrated and discussed in Miller, “Roman Gusto in New England,” pp. 167–70. For more on Welch’s apprenticeship, marriage, and career, see Mabel M. Swan, “Boston’s Carvers and Joiners, Part I,” Antiques 53, no. 3 (March 1948): 199; Myrna Kaye, “Eighteenth-Century Boston Furniture Craftsmen,” in Whitehill, Jobe, and Fairbanks, eds., Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, p. 301; Barbara M. and Gerald W. R. Ward, “The Makers of Copley’s Picture Frames: A Clue,” Old Time New England 67 (summer-fall 1976): 16–20; Luke Beckerdite, “Carving Practices in Eighteenth-Century Boston,” in New England Furniture: Essays in Memory of Benno Forman, edited by Brock Jobe (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1987), pp. 123–62; Morrison H. Heckscher, “Copley’s Picture Frames,” in Carrie Rebora, Paul Staiti, et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Harry Abrams for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), pp. 142–59; and Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode.” Evidently, Robinson was very successful. His inventory included shop goods valued at £139.19.8 and a silver plate worth £58.10.1 (Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 313). 17. Richards and Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur, pp. 24–26. Sarah May’s father, Samuel (b. Roxbury, February 17, 1723; d. Boston, August 9, 1794), was a Boston area carpenter. If the chair descended in his line, Samuel was probably the second owner. For more on the May family, see Rev. Samuel May, “Col. Joseph May, 1760–1841,” New England Historical Genealogical Register 27, no. 2 (April 1873): 113–15. The Johnson history was given to Michigan dealer Jess Pavey, who sold the armchair to the Henry Ford Museum (Jess Pavey to Leigh Keno and Joan Barzilay Freund, August 9, 1996). 18. Another late baroque Boston easy chair with baluster-turned side stretchers and double-scrolled arms is illustrated in Richards and Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur, pp. 142–44. This example also has rear legs with almost no rake, another feature that links it with the early examples illustrated in figures 13 and 14. The Winterthur chair probably dates from the late 1720s or early 1730s. 19. For more on Smibert, see Richard H. Saunders, John Smibert, Colonial America’s First Portrait Painter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press for the Barra Foundation, 1995), p. 174, no. 73. Grant Account Book, 1728–1733. On October 9, 1728, Fitch wrote, “Andrew Oliver Dr to Cash paid him towards his Wife Mary’s portion One Thousand Pounds” (Fitch Account Book). On September 3, 1734, Fitch sold Smibert white lead and linseed oil (ibid.). Grant Account Book, April 29, 1732. Brock Jobe, “The Boston Furniture Industry, 1720–1740,” p. 44, fig. 32. An identical chair with rounded stiles is illustrated in John Kirk, American Chairs: Queen Anne and Chippendale (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 129, no. 161. 20. Grant Account Book, February 4, 1731/32. John Wainwright commissioned the painting in the summer of 1728. For more on The Bermuda Group, see Richard H. Saunders and Ellen G. Miles, American Colonial Portraits, 1700–1776 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1987), pp. 116–21. Christie’s, Works of Art from Houghton, pp. 294–300. Two other Boston backstools from the same shop as figure 33 are known. One is in a private collection in the Midwest, and the other is owned by Leigh Keno, Inc. In London, chairs with low seats and upholstered backs became fashionable at the end of the seventeenth century and were often referred to as “dressing chairs,” indicating that they were probably used in bedchambers. They were occasionally made en suite with easy chairs. On February 21, 1718, London upholsterer George Remey charged £5.5 for “two wallnut wood veneired dressing chaire frames very handsomely made with stuft Backs & seats covered with your gold silk made all Compleat & Fashionable” (Gilbert, “Temple Newsam Furniture Bills,” p. 21). An advertisement in the Boston News-Letter of January 9, 1746, listed goods to be sold at the house of Charles Paxon, including “Eight Walnut Tree Chairs, stuft backs and Seats covered with the same Damask.” 21. For an Irish chair with a stretcher similar to the one on the backstool (fig. 33), see Antiques 57, no. 5 (May 1950): 336. Grant Account Book, February 3, 1741/42. The authors thank Jeanne Vibert Sloane for the reference to flat stretchers. A Boston or Portsmouth side chair at the Ipswich Historical Society has a carved crest rail, an India back, sawn cabriole legs with leaf-carved hoof feet, and flat stretchers. The authors thank Bob Trent for information on this chair. 22. For more on the Apthorp chairs and related seating, see Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode.” 23. Samuel Grant Account Book, October 25, 1736. The chair tally was derived from Grant’s Account Book. 24. Brock Jobe, “Boston Furniture Industry, 1725–1760” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1976), p. 83. 25. John R. Commons, “American Shoemakers, 1648–1895: A Sketch of Industrial Evolution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 24, no. 4 (November 1909): 48–50, as cited in Jeanne A. Vibert, “Market Economy and the Furniture Trade of Newport, Rhode Island” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1981), pp. 2–3. Vibert noted that “elaborate custom-order work comprised only one level of production in the pre-industrial economy. Expanding trade in the eighteenth century provided the craftsman with a wide market for his goods, so that he looked beyond his own neighborhood for customers. Colonial cabinetmakers, like other artisan-producers, manufactured goods of varying levels of quality and cost depending on the nature of the market.” 26. Samuel Grant Account Book, 1728–1733. 27. Clifford K. Shipton and John L. Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College, 17 vols. (1942; reprint ed., Boston: Harvard University Printing Office, 1962), 12: 151. Anderson Galleries, Colonial Furniture, The Superb Collection of Mr. Francis Hill Bigelow of Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, January 17, 1924, lot. 142. William Ellery, Jr., also attended Harvard (class of 1747) and roomed with Andrew Oliver, Jr., whose mother was Mary Fitch (see fig. 30). For more on the Ellery family, see Shipton and Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College, 7:66–69, 12:134–52. Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode.” A Boston chair similar to the example shown in figure 43 but with pad feet is illustrated in Edwin J. Hipkiss, Eighteenth-Century American Arts: The M. and M. Karolik Collection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1941), p. 142, fig. 79. 28. For more on Grendy, see Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert, eds., Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, 1660–1840 (London: W. S. Maney and Son for the Furniture History Society, 1986), pp. 371–72; and Christopher Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall, 2 vols. (London: National Art-Collections Fund and the Leeds Art Collections Fund, 1978), 2:79–80. A set of British side chairs related to the Boston example shown in figure 44 is illustrated in Sotheby’s, A Celebration of the English Country House, New York, April 16–17, 1998, lot 802. For an illustration of Apthorp’s bureau with cabinet, see Keno, Freund, and Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode,” p. 272, fig. 2. 29. For the Bromfield chairs, see Sotheby’s American Furniture Department files. For the Huse history, see Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston: By the museum, 1965), pp. 170–71, no. 133. 30. Grant Account Books, April 13, 1739–March 21, 1747/48. Brock Jobe and Mryna Kaye, New England Furniture, The Colonial Era: Selections from the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), pp. 362–64, no. 101. 31. For Grant’s bill to Green, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 358. As quoted in Jobe, “The Boston Furniture Industry,” p. 34, nt. 58. 32. Grant Account Book, October 26, 1756. Morrison H. Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Late Colonial Period: The Queen Anne and Chippendale Styles (New York: Random House for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), pp. 122–24, no. 72. Telephone conversation with Amelia Peck, Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 19, 1998. Two other Boston easy chairs have their original Irish-stitch covers. They are in the Winterthur and Bayou Bend collections. 33. Although no bills, labels, or account books were mentioned in the sale catalogue, the set was identified as the work of Job Townsend and “purchased in Warren, Rhode Island, from a descendant of the original owner.” Anderson Art Galleries, Philip Flayderman Collection, January 4, 1930, lots 492, 493; Anderson Galleries, One Hundred Important American Antiques, January 9, 1932, lots 80, 81, 85. The Eddy chairs are in a private collection in California. Job Townsend Account Books, Newport Historical Society. Jeanne A. Vibert, “Rhode Island—Attributed Queen Anne Chairs,” unpublished paper, University of Delaware, December 22, 1978, p. 6; and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press for the Chipstone Foundation, 1984), p. 38, no. 17. 34. For example, on May 3, 1743, Eddy transported “30 Chairs Leather Back & Bottom @ 38/ [and] 6 Ditto Leather Bottoms @ 35/6” to John Banister of Newport (Banister Invoice Book, Rhode Island Historical Society). For more on Jeremiah Eddy, see Ruth Eddy, comp., The Eddy Family in America (1930; reprint ed., Ann Arbor, Mich.: Braun-Brumfield, Inc., 1990), p. 74. 35. Attribution of the Eddy chairs to Townsend became more entrenched following the publication of Ralph E. Carpenter, Jr.’s, The Arts and Crafts of Newport Rhode Island 1640–1820 (Newport, R.I.: The Preservation Society of Newport, 1954), p. 39, nos. 13, 17. Charles Hummel’s “Queen Anne and Chippendale Furniture in the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum” (Antiques 98, no. 6 [December 1970]: 900–9), questioned this attribution as cited by Carpenter in The Arts and Crafts of Newport and Joseph Ott in The John Brown House Loan Exhibition of Rhode Island Furniture (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1965), p. 4, no 4; however, Hummel also attributed the Eddy chairs to Rhode Island. “John Goddard and His Work,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design 15, no. 2 (April 1927):15. The original letters from Brown to Goddard are at the Rhode Island Historical Society. When Ralph Carpenter included a chair from the set in The Arts and Crafts of Newport, he wrote that the set was “evidently the ‘leather chairs’ referred to in a letter from Moses Brown to John Goddard” (p. 37, no. 11). Frank Fuller, archivist at the Moses Brown School, confirmed that the Moses Brown School’s attribution of the chairs to Goddard was based upon Carpenter’s research (Fuller to Keno and Freund, August 16, 1996) and not upon any evidence provided by the Brown family at the time the chairs were donated. Vibert, “Rhode Island Chairs,” p. 6. See The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Collecting American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, 1971–1991 (Boston: By the museum, 1991), p. 35, pl. 8. For more on Barrett, see Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture, pp. 154–55. 36. Brock Jobe, “The Boston Upholstery Trade,” in Upholstery in America & Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, edited by Edward S. Cooke, Jr. (New York, W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 78. The number of ships was derived from customhouse clearances posted in the Boston News-Letter and Boston Gazette. Thomas Fitch Account Books, 1719–1732 and 1732–1736. Boston figures taken from Myrna Kaye, “Eighteenth-Century Boston Furniture Craftsmen,” 267–302. Newport figures taken from Wendell D. Garrett, “The Newport Cabinetmakers: A Corrected Check List,” Antiques 73, no 6 (June 1958): 558–61; Joseph K. Ott, “Recent Discoveries among Rhode Island Cabinetmakers and Their Work,” “More Notes on Rhode Island Cabinetmakers,” and “Still More Notes of Rhode Island Cabinetmakers and Their Work,” Rhode Island History 28, nos. 1, 2, 4 (winter, spring, and fall 1969): 18–24, 51–52, 116–21; and Vibert, “Market Economy of Newport,” pp. 91–93. Joiners and cabinetmakers have been counted together due to the vagaries of eighteenth-century terminology. Vibert noted that at Newport both terms referred “to makers of case furniture as opposed to chairmakers, housewrights and ship joiners.” Ronald Potvin is presently compiling a list of cabinetmakers and joiners in Newport and feels that current compilations include many craftsmen who simply did not make furniture. 37. John Banister to John Thomlinson, June 1, 1738, Banister Copy Book, 1730–1742, Newport Historical Society. Undated invoices between dated letters, Banister Copy Book. 38. Banister Papers, Newport Historical Society. “Invoice of sundrys recd of Capt. Powers as Letter of Advice of July 1, 1743,” in John Banister Invoice Book, 1739, p. 134. 39. Port of Annapolis Entries, Maryland, vol. 1, ms. 21, Maryland Historical Society. Vibert, “Market Economy of Newport,” p. 23. 40. “Invoice of Sundry’s ship . . . on board ye Sheffield,” Banister Invoice Book, 1739. John Banister to Thomas and James Hayward, May 28, 1739, Banister Copy Book, 1730–1742.