1. Stanley Stone, “Life Begins at Fifty,” in Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), vii, viii. Stanley Stone lecture notes, Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, Wis.
2. Milwaukee Journal, undated clipping, Chipstone Foundation. The Chesapeake details reflect Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn’s experiences with the restoration and reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg.
3. Invoice, April 22, 1964, accession files, Chipstone Foundation. All subsequent references to invoices are from these files.
4. Eighteenth-century designs for chairs with upholstered backs and open arms are shown in Pictorial History of British Eighteenth-Century Design, compiled by Elizabeth White (Suffolk, Eng.: Antique Collector’s Club, Ltd., 1990): 100–104. The earliest manifestations of this form have their origins in seventeenth-century seating commissioned for the courts of Paris and Versailles. Made with tall, upholstered backs and open arms, these fauteuils subsequently attained a measure of popularity in Britain where they were referred to by various names including “grand chairs” and “elbow stools.” Daniel Marot illustrated the archetypal late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French model in Second Livre d’Apartements and Nouveaux Livres di Licts de differentes penseez (ca. 1703 and 1713), pls. 5, 7 (p. 98). These chairs and their later variants often had accompanying seating forms referred to today as “backstools.” Gaetano Brunetti’s Sixty Different Sorts of Ornament (1736) illustrates two upholstered armchairs and two similar backstools. The armchairs are essentially baroque forms with Italianate undercarriages and nascent rococo details (p. 99). These are the only published British designs for high-back upholstered chairs with open arms and cabriole legs known to the authors, and surviving examples of this form are extremely rare. Most eighteenth-century upholstered chairs with open arms and cabriole legs had low backs. British architect William Kent designed several types in his distinctive Palladian style, examples of which are shown in J. Vardy, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones & William Kent (1744), pl. 43 (p. 99). Although rococo versions probably became fashionable in Britain by the late 1740s, they were not represented in design books prior to the publication of Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754). Chippendale called this form a “French chair” (pp. 100-101). Related seating forms described as “French chairs” and “French Back Stools” are also illustrated in William Ince and John Mayhew, The Universal System of Houshold Furniture (1762), pls. 55, 56, 58, 59 (p. 103); the Society of Upholsterers, Genteel Houshold Furniture in the Present Taste (1765), pls. 26–28 (p. 102); and Robert Manwaring, The Cabinet and Chair-Maker’s Real Friend and Companion (1765), pls. 16, 17, 21–23 (p. 104). Plate 10 of George Hepplewhite’s The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide (1794) illustrates designs for “cabriole chairs,” which have upholstered backs, open arms, and a gap between the seat and back (p. 105). His designs for “state chairs” are similar but they do not show a gap in the back (p. 106).
The earliest publication showing an American chair with an upholstered back, open arms, and cabriole legs is Luke Vincent Lockwood’s Colonial Furniture in America, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1921), 2:109 , no. 582. Although not examined by the authors, this chair appears to be a period example. It has extremely upright rear post/legs that extend almost straight down below the seat rails and small knee blocks that relate to corresponding elements on an authentic Rhode Island easy chair in a private collection (David Conradson, Useful Beauty: Early American Decorative Arts From St. Louis Collections [St. Louis, Mo.: St. Louis Art Museum, 1999], pp. 42–43). The absence of other illustrated examples in the major furniture compendiums of the 1920s and 1930s (i.e. Francis Clary Morse, Furniture of the Olden Time [1902; reprint, New York: MacMillan Co., 1917]; Esther Singleton, Furniture of Our Forefathers [New York: Doubleday, 1913]; Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, 3 vols. [Framingham, Mass.: Old America Co., 1928]; Edgar G. Miller, American Antique Furniture, 2 vols. [1937; reprint, New York: Dover, 1966]) suggests that the form was extremely rare. Two chairs of this general form, but with turned stretchers and arms attached to the face of the side seat rails, are shown in Loan Exhibition of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Furniture and Glass...for the Benefit of the National Council of Girl Scouts (New York: American Art Galleries, 1929), nos. 577, 605. Following that publication, similar chairs began to appear in the advertisements of dealers. Most of the chairs of this type that have appeared in the marketplace are fakes. Like the example in the Chipstone collection, they tend to include parts salvaged from neoclassical lolling chairs and details that are either overstated or incorrectly adapted. These chairs represent a genre of fakes that continue to be bought by collectors, exhibited by museums, and published by furniture historians.
5. Ralph E. Carpenter, Jr., The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1820 (Newport, R.I.: Preservation Society of Newport County, 1954), p. 68. For more on the high chest, see Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1988), pp. 268–70, no. 141. The feet of this high chest are very unusual and resemble those on Irish furniture more than Newport work. The authors have not examined this chest. The easy chair shown in fig. 11 illustrates one avenue through which fakers exploited flaws in scholarship. During the middle of the twentieth century, regionalism was a major theme in the American furniture field, and many scholars and collectors ascribed to the theory that all major urban centers produced a similar range of case, table, and seating forms. Often overlooking channels of trade and commerce, this perspective tended to maintain that furniture used or found in a given region was made there. Recent scholarship has refuted this approach in many areas. Leigh Keno, Alan Miller, and Joan Barzilay Freund have demonstrated that Boston chair makers and merchant upholsterers dominated the market for seating furniture in New England and parts of the middle colonies prior to the Revolution (Leigh Keno, Alan Miller, and Joan Barzilay Freund, “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], pp. 266–306). Because of this dominance, few Newport easy chairs were made. The authors know of only three authentic examples: one illustrated in Conradson, Useful Beauty, pp. 42–43; one in the Rhode Island Historical Society (Carpenter, Arts and Crafts of Newport, p. 54); and one illustrated in Christie’s Important American Furniture, Silver, Prints, Folk Art, and Decorative Arts, New York, January 18–19, 2001, lot 59.
6. Michael and Miriam Gratz were prominent members of Philadelphia’s Jewish community. Michael was born in Lagersdorf, Silesia. In 1759, he emigrated from London to Philadelphia, where he joined his brother Bernard in the mercantile business. A decade later, Michael married Miriam Simon. Her father, Joseph, was a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, merchant and business associate of Michael and Bernard (Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, p. 208.) The couple may have purchased the original easy chair, a set of side chairs, and a dressing table shortly after their wedding in 1769. All of these objects were intended to match an elaborate high chest that Michael may have purchased soon after arriving in Philadelphia.
7. Philadelphia easy chairs with cabriole legs and arms shaped like those of a sofa rather than the more common double c-scroll variety are rare. Like the fake Gratz chairs, most fraudulent forms are built around the frames of straight-leg chairs. A few authentic Philadelphia easy chairs with sofa-form arms survive including one commissioned by John and Elizabeth Cadwalader (private collection on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art); one in the Winterthur Museum; one in a private collection in Milwaukee, Wis.; and one formerly in the Robb Collection (Israel Sack, Inc., American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, 10 vols. [Alexandria, Va.: Highland House, 1974], 5: 1208–9).
8. For more on chairs attributed to members of the Gaines family, see Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks of the New Hampshire Seacoast, edited by Brock Jobe (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1993), pp. 295–300, nos. 77, 78; and Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Winterthur Museum, 1997), pp. 31–36, nos. 17–19.
9. Invoice, February 14, 1964. Richards and Evans, New England Furniture, p. 35.
10. The attribution to Bernard is based on unpublished research by the authors. See J. Michael Flanigan, American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), pp. 26, 27 for one of the chairs reputedly used by Washington.
11. Loan Exhibition of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Furniture and Glass...for the Benefit of the National Council of Girl Scouts, no. 627. Although the authors have not examined the table from the Girl Scouts Loan Exhibition, it too may be a fake. The shaped beaded skirt is similar to those on many straight-leg Newport card tables. It is possible that an early faker married thin, Boston-style legs to a Newport frame. If so, this would not be the first instance when one fake inspired another. Few eighteenth-century cabinetmakers had rasps, which were diYcult and time-consuming to make. First-cut files produced most of the coarse striations found on the interior surfaces of early American furniture. Cabinetmakers typically owned several files ranging from coarse to fine.
12. Joseph Downs, American Furniture: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (New York: MacMillan Co., 1952), nos. 340, 341.
13. The histories of wear and use manifest on reused components are often inconsistent with their position and use on fakes. Visible discrepancies of this type are useful in identifying fakes.
14. Barry A. Greenlaw, New England Furniture at Williamsburg (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1974), p. 152, no. 132.
15. Invoice, April 15, 1959.
16. For a description of the traditional “peeling” technique of spindle turning, see F. Pain, The Practical Woodturner (1956; reprint, New York: Drake Publishers, 1974). Modern turning on a high-speed lathe is more akin to scraping than peeling.
17. For more on Harding, see Luke Beckerdite, “An Identity Crisis: Philadelphia and Baltimore Furniture Styles of the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” in Shaping a National Culture: The Philadelphia Experience, 1750–1800, edited by Catherine E. Hutchins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Winterthur Museum, 1995), pp. 243–81.
18. Invoice, November 25, 1958.
19. Carpenter, Arts and Crafts of Newport, p. 88, no. 60.
20. Stone, “Life Begins at Fifty,” ix.
21. For more on this shop, see Alan Miller, “Roman Gusto in New England: An Eighteenth-Century Designer and His Shop,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1993), pp. 160–211. |