?with a diVerent mark and a history of having been imported from England in the mid-1680s by the Winthrop family. In all probability, the mark on the chair illustrated in figure 15 was made when the chair was re-caned some fifty years after it arrived in New England.17
The theory that the “I” refers to a caner or caning shop is also bolstered by the character of the marks, which do not have the professional quality one might expect from a joinery shop. Although the execution of the “I” marks varies, implying a number of diVerent hands, all are punched rather than stamped or branded like most owners’ marks on furniture of the period. Other caned chairs with punched letters or symbols are known, however (see figs. 17, 18). The shallow, round indentations comprising these marks may have been made with a common caning tool. Caners typically used small metal styluses to push the cane through holes, particularly those with more than one strand running through them.18
Regardless of the meaning of the punched “I,” the mark serves to group these chairs in time and space. All were either made or present in Boston between about 1710 and 1725. The Boston examples display a remarkable degree of stylistic conformity, most incorporating features derived from London caned chairs of the 1690s as well as early Georgian chairs of the 1710s. Although it is possible that many of these chairs are from the same shop, the structural shortcuts and piece-work systems that developed to support Boston’s leather chair manufacturing and export business contributed to the standardization of design. Specialists such as carvers and turners sold similar components to diVerent chair makers who produced assembled frames for local clients as well as merchants and upholsterers engaged in the coastal trade.
All of the Boston chairs have turned undercarriages with similar front, medial, and rear stretchers. The stretcher configuration on the chairs comes in two versions, one with the medial stretcher joined into the side stretchers at their midpoint, and the other with the medial stretcher shifted towards the front of the chair. Forman thought the latter configuration to be later because of its use in Boston Georgian seating, but this can be neither proved nor disproved. Most Boston caned chairs have turned front legs with “Spanish” or tassel feet, or square “unwrought” cabriole legs. Again, one would like to believe that the cabriole legs indicate a later date within the overall sequence of the group, but it could well be that this was simply an interchangeable feature. When turned, the legs conform to one of two patterns, distinguishable by the degree of elongation in the upper vase turning. Most if not all of the chairs had shaped aprons attached with nails (see fig. 1), though most have been lost. A few examples have similar aprons on the side rails, but this does not appear to have been a common feature. Most crucially, all of the “I” chairs have molded stiles that move fluidly into the crests, showing that the shop or shops that produced them had some awareness of early Georgian composition.
The crests of the “I” chairs display more variation than any other component, but a degree of uniformity is evident. All of the crests have shallow, carved leaves in the lower corners of the design, and all have carved edge beads that intersect the planed beads on the stiles (see fig. 19). These signature elements link all of the Boston chairs stylistically. The style and basic composition of the carving, which is similar to that on several unmarked, Boston caned chairs, has precedents in earlier low-backed, leather chairs (see fig. 20). Somewhat later, Philadelphia chair makers used similar motifs (see fig. 21), probably in an eVort to compete with fashionable Boston imports.19
Apart from the leaf carving and edge moldings, the crest patterns are quite diVerent from each other. The most common variant has a foliate spray that extends upwards from the middle of the crest (see figs. 1, 19). Often the points of intersection between this element and the other parts of the crest are small, leaving very little wood to hold the top of the chair together (see fig. 22). Perhaps owing to this fragile design, chair makers occasionally left a “bridge” of wood on the lower, rear edge of the crest. This feature provided additional support to resist the torque and stress of the caning process and subsequent use. Two of the three extant armchairs in the “I” group have foliate sprays and unusually short arms that rest on supports joined directly into the middle of the side seat rails (see fig. 23). As is the case with later Georgian armchairs, they are broader in seat width than the side chairs in the group.20
The second most common type of crest, which occurs on at least five of the “I” chairs, is clearly derived from late English caned chairs (see fig. 24). This design features a squared-oV top that is connected to the stiles by sinuous molded serpentine shapes. Decorative carved volutes, either two or four in number, articulate the upper edge of these crests. Like the first crest pattern (see figs. 1, 12), this variant sometimes has a strengthening bridge in the back. It bears a strong visual relationship to both of the other crest designs, particularly the one with a central foliate spray, but in many examples it is carved in a summary fashion. The sloping planes of the front of the crest are often choppy, and the carved leaves are reduced to nearly illegible stubs. In these crests the rapidity of manufacture is obvious, and such chairs were no doubt produced in large numbers. There are versions of this same crest pattern on many Boston area chairs outside the “I” group.
Two caned chairs with squared-oV crests have leaf elements that were outlined, modeled, and shaded more professionally than those on other chairs in the group. The example shown in figures 25 and 26 has two small leaf clusters with carefully regulated shading cuts. This work may be a precursor to the linear acanthus carving found on two of the earliest Boston Georgian chairs. The most ornately carved of the chairs related to the “I” group (fig. 27) is not caned at all, but it seems to represent the apotheosis of the Boston style. The chair appears to have been made in that city or in nearby Ipswich, Massachusetts. With its shaped stretchers, collared cabriole legs (fig. 28), and Chinese banister, this object may be slightly later than the “I” chairs. It does, however, preserve the basic form of the “I” chair crests. The signature leaf carvings are present, but they are more naturalistic and complex than those on any “I” chair (fig. 29). If the chair illustrated in figure 27 is an Ipswich product, it may well be from the Gaines family shop, which frequently adapted and amplified designs from Boston-area products.21
The third crest found on the “I” chairs is the most complex, with molded cyma elements terminating in bold scroll volutes, multiple leaf elements outlined by piercings, and flat planes decorated with small carved panels and chip cuts (see figs. 30, 31). This is an extraordinarily fragile design, and like the two most common crest patterns, it is held together with a bridge of wood at the lower, back edge of the crest (fig. 32). In terms of the overall handling of the carving, this crest type stands apart in its contrast of strong graphic and fussy passages. The carving is also flatter and less refined than that seen on most of the other chairs. It is likely that these chairs represent the work of a diVerent carver or even a diVerent shop than the other “I” group chairs.
The fourth and fifth crest patterns are rare, one appearing on two chairs (see fig. 33) This yoke or saddled crest has no decoration other than simple leaf carving; however, this work is less perfunctory than that found on many “I” chairs. The final and most idiosyncratic crest occurs on a single chair that descended in the Edes family of Boston (fig. 34). This design has the vestigial leaves of the other patterns and the intact “bridge” of wood in the back, but otherwise stands apart from the rest of the group.
The structural and stylistic features of the “I” group and its relatives indicate that Boston chair makers adopted the tricks of the middling London trade. At first one would think that the chairs are the confused products of makers who were operating with an imperfect understanding of the new Georgian style. With two exceptions, the stiles of the chairs are straight from seat rail to crest, so they could be made simply by preparing a straight piece of lumber and then running a molding down each side. One of the “I” chairs that does have cyma-curved stiles also features a “crook’d,” vasiform splat, and the other is made of walnut, suggesting a more mature awareness of Georgian design and perhaps a later date than the other chairs in the group (figs. 35–37). Even these two chairs lack the overall compositional unity that Shaftesbury and his generation prized; for that, Bostonians would have to wait a decade or more (see fig. 38). Yet it is not a coincidence that the early Georgian features that appear on the chairs—notably molded stiles and square cabriole legs—are neither time-consuming to execute, nor disruptive to an established tradition of piece-work manufacture. In this respect, the makers of the chairs should be seen, like English caned chair makers before them, as canny artisans who were able to adapt new stylistic features without disrupting their own profit margin and way of working.
The “I” chairs clearly occupy a complex position in furniture history. They are structurally simple objects, but extremely complicated texts. The chairs reflect some of the same cultural preoccupations that spurred the popularity of the caned chair in England in the 1670s even though the “signifying” crest is the only salient compositional feature surviving from the earlier forms. The “I” chairs also have little in common with the first generation of Boston caned chairs (see fig. 39), which, like most seminal seating forms produced in that city, were more direct transpositions of London models.
In many respects, the “I” chairs can be interpreted as descendants of early Boston leather chairs, which performed the same role for that city’s trade that the caned chair had played in London. As historian Neil Kamil has shown, the leather chair was part of a conscious and ultimately successful attempt to right Boston’s own balance of trade. Although New Englanders could not compete with the staple producing colonies to the south, they could produce furniture and other finished goods that would give them a favorable balance of trade with the Middle Atlantic. This strategy was obviously based on the more entrenched mercantile system of the mother country.22
Against this backdrop, it is possible to find in the “I” chairs more than an example of a shift toward Georgian style. Their part in this broad stylistic trend is undeniable, but it is also clear that the “I” chairs were perfect symbols of an even more large-scale attempt to transform the symbolic culture of the mercantile class. By combining the carved crests of the English caned chair and Boston leather chair with nascent Georgian features, the “I” chairs crystallized the mentality of Boston’s upwardly mobile commercial elite. In this sense the chairs mark the transition between what might be called the “mercantilist style” and a new concept of taste and fashionability. Though culturally severed from the elitism of Shaftesbury and his contemporaries, they are nonetheless structurally consonant with that elitism. All of the examples with credible provenances descended in families of the upper class including the Hancocks, Holyokes, and Aldens. These seating forms mark the appropriation by such civic leaders of competitive tactics that had put Londoners at the center of that empire. And like the Georgian style in England, they mark the end of those tactics’ eYcacy. From the 1710s to the 1740s, Boston was the most important center of the American carrying trade, and its merchants grew wealthy through commerce with the West Indies. This elite identified strongly with the English monarchy and was instrumental in transforming New England into a class-conscious society. As in England, the government’s role in the economy was reimagined, and the theocracy of the seventeenth century gave way to a more instrumental oligarchy that tried to foster the success of trade. Given the presence of this upwardly mobile clientele, it was only logical that Boston chair makers embraced the same strategy that guided their London counterparts thirty years before. It is ironic that so much scholarly eVort has been expended on reading the inscrutable “I” marks on these chairs, when those marks were not intended to be highly legible. To read these chairs as texts, we need to pay the most attention to the areas where the makers invested the majority of their skill and labor—the crests, which were the site of greatest visual impact. After all, the chairs were not so much fashionable as representations of fashionability itself. In this respect, they bespeak conscious participation in the larger world of English mercantilism, in which membership in the middle class was more a matter of assertion than taste.23

acknowledgments  The author thanks Gavin Ashworth, Luke Beckerdite, Ann Bermingham, Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Tom Denenberg, Janet Deranian, Bert Denker, Eleanore Gadsden, Constance and Dudley Godfrey, Charles Hummel, Alan Miller, Jonathan Prown, Robert F. Trent, Maria Theresa and John Van Der Sande, Anne and Fred Vogel, and Alicia Volk.
1. For characteristics distinguishing Dutch chairs from English derivatives, see Adam Bowett, “Myths of Furniture History: Anglo-Dutch (Part II),” Antique Collecting 34, no. 8 (February 2000): 4–9. Colin Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach,” in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 40. See also Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988); Weatherill argues that “If social emulation were at work as a dynamic force behind people’s motivation in owning goods, then we would expect higher proportions of the most highly regarded group to own many [items], and we would also expect them to be the first to own the new things. Yet...this was not the case, for a higher proportion of professionals and tradesmen owned the goods associated with front stage areas of the house” (p. 195). For a more general objection to diVusion models on theoretical grounds, see Dell Upton, “Towards A Performance Theory of Vernacular Architecture: Early Tidewater Virginia As a Case Study,” Folklore Forum 12, no. 2/3 (1979). Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730: An Interpretive Catalogue (New York: W.W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 229–81.
2. R. W. Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” Connoisseur 27, no. 3 (March 1951): 8.
3. Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” p. 8. Since Symonds’ analysis in the 1950s, Peter Earle has questioned the importance of the Great Fire in initiating cane chair manufacture. In his analysis of middle-class estate records, the form appears only rarely in the 1670s and does not become common until the 1680s. This may, however, simply reflect a time lag between the introduction of the form and its appearance in the inventories of decedents, who might have owned the chairs for some time before the furniture came to be recorded. See Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 294.
4. Irene Scouloudi, “The Stranger Community in the Metropolis, 1558–1640” in Scouloudi, Huguenots in Britain and Their French Background (Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan Press, 1987), pp. 48–49; Penelope Corfield, “A Provincial Capital in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Case of Norwich,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns, edited by Peter Clark and P. Slack (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 282; Christopher Hartop, The Huguenot Legacy: English Silver 1680–1760 (London: Thomas Heneage, 1996). Jonathan Israel, “England, the Dutch, and the Struggle for the Mastery of World Trade in the Age of the Glorious Revolution,” in The World of William and Mary, edited by Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 75. Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 198.
5. Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 2: 25–26.
6. John Keymer, A Clear and Evident Way [1650], quoted in Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 76. On Mun, see Kustaa Multamäki, Towards Great Britain: Commerce and Conquest in the Thought of Algernon Sidney and Charles Davenant (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Arts and Letters, 1999), p. 83 V.; Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 93–94; Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1970), pp. 5–6; and Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2: 281–82. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: Thomas Clark, 1664; written 1623), p. 15. On the eVects of the Navigation Acts on the colonies, see Susan Previant Lee and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), chapter 2. For contemporary arguments about the importance of finished goods, see Dalby Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies (London: Joseph Hindemarsh, 1690), p. 5; Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, chapter 7, passim.
7. Sir Josiah Child, A Discourse About Trade (London: A. Sowle, 1690; written 1660s), p. 4. John Houghton, England’s Great Happiness, or, A Dialogue Between Contentment and Complaint (London: Edward Croft, 1677), p. 5; Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies, p. 16. Carew Reynel, The True English Interest (London: Giles Widdowes, 1674), preface 4; p. 2. Houghton, England’s Great Happiness, pp. 5, 10.
8. Quoted in Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” p. 12. For further discussion of this document, see Margaret Swain, “The Turkey-work Chairs of Holyroodhouse,” in Upholstery in America and Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, edited by Edward S. Cooke, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 54–55.
9. The rattan or cane used in such chairs might have come from a variety of sources, as the plant is native to China, India, Ceylon, and Malaysia. In all likelihood the canes used in English shops were bought from Dutch or Portuguese middlemen. On cane, see Gertrude Z. Thomas, Richer Than Spices (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), chapter 5; and Encyclopedie Methodique, Tome Quatrieme (Paris: Chez Panckouche, 1785).
10. Symonds, “English Cane Chairs: Part I,” pp. 13–14. The Joiners’ Company’s claim that “many thousands” of workers benefited seems dubious, but it is a figure substantiated by modern research. Peter Earle notes that “several thousand” people were employed in the furniture trade in London alone, concentrated in the area north of the Strand.
11. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 23. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London: Thomas Milbourn, 1690), pp. 34–35.
12. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 107–9. Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, p. 76. On the embrace of luxury trades within mercantilism, see also Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2: 190. Carole Shammas, “The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 1 (1980): 18. Dudley North, Discourses Upon Trade (London: Thomas Basset, 1691), pp. 2, 14; Bernard Mandeville, “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), in The Fable of the Bees, edited by F. B. Kage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 102–5, 25. See also Herlitz Lars, “Conceptions of History and Society in Mercantilism, 1650–1730,” in Mercantilist Economics, edited by Lars Magnussen (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), p. 111.
13. Ralph Davis, A Commercial Revolution (London: Historical Associations Pamphlets, 1967), p. 4. On the currency shortage, see Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, p. 231. Daniel Defoe, The True Born Englishman: A Satyr (London: n.p., 1700), p. 57. Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 13–26. John Bellers, Essays About the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations and Immorality (London: T. Sowle, 1699), p. 11.
14. Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); Rex A. Barrell, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury and ‘Le Refuge Français’—Correspondence (Lewiston/Lampeter/Queenstone, Eng.: Studies in British History, Volume 15, The Edwin Mellin Press, 1989). Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John A. Bernstein, “Shaftesbury’s Identification of the Good and the Beautiful,” Eighteenth Century Studies 10, no. 3 (spring 1977): 306–7; and John A. Bernstein, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant (London and Toronto: Associated University Press and Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), p. 26. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 411 (June 21, 1712).
15. Kammen, Empire and Interest, p. 38; Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2: 19. The first Earl died in exile in Holland, after being imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1673 for his opposition to the accession of James II to the throne. Shaftesbury is quoted in David Solkin, Painting for Money (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 12. See also Klein, Shaftesbury and Culture of Politeness, p. 5.
16. Benno Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 264–66; Richard Randall, American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), pp. 162–64.
17. For the Winthrop family chair, see Patricia E. Kane, “Furniture Owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society,” Antiques 109, no. 5 (May 1976): 960–69.
18. For stamped and branded examples, see Roderic H. Blackburn, “Branded and Stamped New York Furniture,” Antiques 119, no. 4 (May 1981): 1130–45.
19. See Forman, American Seating Furniture, cat. nos. 55, 63.
20. Colin Streeter thought that the motif on this crest type might be based upon the Chinese ruyi, an abstraction of a mushroom. Forman repeats this idea in American Seating Furniture, p. 267, footnote; see also Philip M. Johnston et al., Courts and Colonies: The William and Mary Style in Holland, England, and America (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1988), p. 162. Johnson notes that if this is the case, then these chairs are the first instances of a Chinese motif appearing on American furniture.
21. For more on these early Boston Georgian chairs, see Joan Barzilay Freund and Leigh Keno, “The Making and Marketing of Boston Seating Furniture in the Late Baroque Style,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1997), pp. 14–16, figs. 20–24.
22. 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. Kamil notes that in one case, William Gooch of Virginia complained to Parliament that Boston’s chair trade was in direct conflict with England’s own mercantile interests, which was of course true (p. 193). For a lively riposte to Kamil’s argument that New York chairs were made in competition with Boston imports, see 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. 175–94.
23. Freund and Keno, “The Making and Marketing of Boston Seating Furniture,” pp. 1–40. Of the chairs in the group with a known provenance, one descended to the Hancock family (Winterthur Museum); one was owned by Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard University (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard); and one was acquired by the Pilgrim Society from Marcia Alden Welch in 1883 and has been ascribed an Alden family provenance. On Boston’s mercantile class, see Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 67–76; Philip S. HaVenden, New England in the English Nation, 1683–1713 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 120; James Henretta, “Economic and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 22 (1965): 75–92; reprint, Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991). Margaret E. Newell, “A Revolution in Economic Thought: Currency and Development in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, edited by Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997), pp. 1–21.