1. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Seven Discourses on Art (1771), available at www.gutenberg.net/etext00/artds10.txt. Margaretta Lovell, “Mrs. Sargent, Mr. Copley, and the Empirical Eye,” Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 1 (summer 1998): 39. 2. Jules D. Prown, John Singleton Copley: America, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1: 22–23, 59. For more on the Harvard President’s Chair, see Marvin Hightower, “An ‘imposing, ancient, and curious throne’: President’s Chair Is Part of a Grand Tradition,” Harvard Gazette, October 11, 2001. The design inconsistencies of the Bours chair are discussed in Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), pp. 264–66. 3. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 55. Reynolds, Seven Discourses. 4. Wayne Craven, Colonial American Portraiture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 263. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, pp. 53, 55. Few attempts have been made to merge the perspectives of the paintings historian and the decorative arts scholar. Furniture historians have used American paintings as source material, but primarily to identify specific furniture forms or functions. In Centuries and Styles of the American Chair, 1640–1970 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), Robert Bishop used colonial portraiture to cross-reference surviving furniture, but his brief observations are diagnostic and general in nature and do not take into consideration the possible fictive origin of these forms. The notes in many recent art historical books and articles give evidence of consultation with furniture historians for the identification of specific painted objects, but still lacking is any fuller transdisciplinary discourse of the sort created through recent interactions between colonial costume and paintings specialists. The most substantive work on furniture in early portraiture appears in Christopher Monkhouse’s thoughtful introduction to a catalogue of a contemporary furniture show at the Rhode Island School of Design (Monkhouse, “The Sitter’s Chair: Furniture in the Service of Portraiture,” in Judith Hoos Fox, Furniture, Furnishings: Subject and Object [Newport: Rhode Island School of Design, 1984], pp. 16–28). This brief essay looks at chairs in American and European art between 1700 and 1950. Monkhouse proposes that these forms merit scholarly attention because the artist chose them to complement the subject of the portrait: “Through the selection of type and style of chair, the artist could make reference to the sitter’s sex, age, origins, occupation, affluence, physical condition, and mental attitude.” Useful social historical and anthropological questions are raised, although the essay focuses primarily on a small number of documented studio chairs and documentable chairs in portraiture. 5. Nancy Goyne Evans, American Windsor Chairs (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p. 245. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, pp. 70, 309. Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984), p. 391. Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture, 1680–1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997), p. 173. The term “spider leg table” appears in the shop accounts of Thomas Chippendale (Christopher Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, 2 vols. [New York: Macmillan, 1978], 1: 222, 230, 2: 224, fig. 410). 6. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 20. In addition to John Singleton Copley in America, other progressive material culture interpretations of colonial portraiture include Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Margaretta M. Lovell, “Reading Eighteenth-Century American Family Portraits,” Winterthur Portfolio 22, no. 4 (winter 1987): 43–64; Carrie Rebora, “Transforming Colonists into Goddesses and Sultans: John Singleton Copley, His Clients, and Their Studio Collaboration,” American Art Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (1995–1996): 4–37; Lovell, “Mrs. Sargent, Mr. Copley, and the Empirical Eye,” pp. 1–39; Claudia B. Kidwell, “Are Those Clothes Real? Transforming the Way Eighteenth-Century Portraits Are Studied,” Dress 24 (1997): 3–15; Leslie Reinhardt, “‘The work of Fancy and Taste’: Copley’s Invented Dress and the Case of Rebecca Boylston,” Dress 29 (2002): 4–18; Margaretta M. Lovell, “Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (1998): 53–67; Maurie D. McInnis, “Cultural Politics, Colonial Crisis, and Ancient Metaphor in John Singleton Copley’s Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard,” Winterthur Portfolio 34, nos. 2–3 (summer/autumn 1999): 85–108. Lovell, “Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress,” pp. 64–65. 7. Reynolds, quoted in Lovell, “Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress,” p. 53. West, quoted in Lovell, “Reading Eighteenth-Century American Family Portraits,” p. 27. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 85. For more on English studios, see Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 41–47. For information on John Smibert’s art collection, see Richard Saunders, John Smibert: Colonial America’s First Portrait Painter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 124. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 20. Even the few surviving inventories of colonial painters are misleading because most were written well after the artist’s active period and fail to distinguish between studio and household belongings. 8. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 225. Jobe and Kaye, New England Furniture, pp. 390–91. A little-known Copley painting, John Erving (1757–1759), stands out because it not only shows a complete Boston chair and tea table but also depicts the sitter in a real room—in every respect an uncommon composition. For an illustration of John Erving, see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: fig. 80. John Kirk was the first to suggest a Boston attribution for the Bright-style chairs in Copley’s work and also that the form may have been based on an actual studio prop, although Kirk was not aware of the connection to documented forms by Bright (John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982], p. 259, figs. 888, 889). 9. A stylistically similar backstool with squared upper corners appears in Copley’s portraits of Mrs. Roland Cotton (Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: fig. 123) and Reverend Nathaniel Appleton (Harvard University Art Collection), painted ca. 1763 and 1760 respectively. The edge beading on the former and decorative nailing on the latter are accurate details, yet features of this sort also appear on furniture in period prints, thus making it difficult to determine what source the artist was copying. Peter Thornton, “Upholstered Seat Furniture in Europe, 17th and 18th Centuries,” 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), p. 34. The Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914, as vol. 71 of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society; reprint, New York: Kennedy Graphics and Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 298. 10. For information on Peter Pelham’s print and art book collection, see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 7, 8, 16. Lovell, “Mrs. Sargent, Mr. Copley, and the Empirical Eye,” p. 21. For specific print sources for early American painting, see Barbara N. Parker, “The Discoveries of Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., Concerning the Influence of the English Mezzotint on Colonial Painting” and the accompanying illustrations of Belknap’s findings, in The Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., Collection of Portraits and Silver (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 125–63. Craven, Colonial American Portraiture, p. 154. Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500–1900 (London: V&A Publications, 2001), p. 79. A similar English high-style chair with carved foliage and a central shell on the crest is found in Robert Feke’s ca. 1747 portrait of the first Mrs. John Channing of Milton, Massachusetts (Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 266, fig. 200). A splat-back late baroque side chair appears in Copley’s portrait John Amory (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which appears to be a Boston form but, as Kirk has noted, was directly copied from another English print by Faber (Kirk, American Furniture, p. 240, fig. 783). 11. Saunders, John Smibert, pp. 14, 16, 154. 12. Ibid., pp. 19 and 22. Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 51. Information on conversation pieces found at National Gallery of Art website; see www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg63/gg63-main1.html. 13. Saunders, John Smibert, p. 22. For a complete listing of the Grant family members, see ibid., p. 137. I am grateful to Robert Trent for his insights into the origins of the chairs in the Grant family sketch and the influence of the Italianate style in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. For more information on the Italianate style in London, see Terry Friedman, “The English Appreciation of Italian Decorations,” Burlington Magazine 117, no. 873 (December 1975): 841–47. 14. Saunders, John Smibert, pp. 59, 253. 15. Ibid., p. 87. Craven, Colonial American Portraiture, pp. 67, 172. After arriving in Boston, Smibert painted several portraits depicting backstools or “low chairs” (see The Bermuda Group, ca. 1729, Yale University Art Gallery). A preliminary sketch (National Gallery of Ireland) features a cabriole leg example with a fully upholstered back that is thin in profile. Like Smibert’s painting of Sir Samuel Grant, this sketch has a wider focus that reveals the legs of the object and sitter. Because of their upholstery treatment, backstools were expensive and attainable only by affluent Americans. Boston furniture makers began to produce low chairs by the mid-1720s, but the examples in Smibert’s paintings resemble British examples rather than their colonial derivatives. The portrayal of upholstered backstools marks an expansion of Smibert’s repertoire of furniture motifs, but not a substantive change in his approach to portrait painting. Saunders concludes that there is no discernible difference between Smibert’s work in England and in America, where he lived until his death in 1751. A look at the depiction of furniture in his art supports this conclusion. Smibert painted one portrait with a distinctly American furniture form—the Boston splat-back chair—in Mary Fitch Oliver and Her Son Andrew Oliver, Jr. (Saunders, John Smibert, p. 95, fig. 94), but otherwise his art follows the conventions of posture, costume, setting, attitude—and furniture—that defined portraiture for the first half of the eighteenth century. Smibert depicted a similar low chair in his 1732 group portrait Daniel, Peter, and Andrew Oliver (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and a taller version in the 1735 image Mrs. William Lambert (Bayou Bend Collection, Houston). 16. Lovell, “Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress,” p. 55. For more on Copley and the influence of Smibert, Badger, and other Boston artists on his work, see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 9–14, 16, 17. Copley depicted other types of emulative backstools that have more in common with European print designs than with actual American forms. His portrait of Mrs. James Otis, painted about 1758, features a substantial backstool covered with leather upholstery and framed with large-headed decorative brass nails. The chair later reappears in the equally matronly portrait Mrs. Samuel Hill (1764) (Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: fig. 148). Lovell, “Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress,” p. 55. 17. Reinhardt, “The work of Fancy and Taste,” pp. 5–6. 18. Ibid., p. 13. For more on Boston upholstery, see Brock Jobe, “The Boston Upholstery Trade, 1700–1775,” 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 & Co., 1987), pp. 65–89. 19. For a side-by-side color comparison of the 1767 and 1769 portraits of Boylston, see Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, pp. 226–27, pls. 31, 32. In terms of historically appropriate table coverings shown in American colonial portraits, many artists painted “Persian” or “Turkey” carpets on tables, a carryover of a seventeenth-century mode of decoration also used on court cupboards. See Smibert’s carefully orchestrated depiction in The Bermuda Group and Robert Feke’s emulative composition, Isaac Royall and Family (Harvard Law Collection). Copley continued this practice in some of his English paintings of the 1780s. After midcentury, American painters, including Copley and later Ralph Earl, document the use of practical textile covers, including green broadcloth on slant-top desks and flat-top writing tables and on the playing surfaces of folding card tables. Pre-Revolutionary portrait painters generally did not place sitters in dining rooms or bedchambers and therefore do not show the common use of washable and bleachable white cotton or linen tablecloths, which sometimes had a damask pattern, on dining tables, tea tables, and dressing tables. I am grateful to Linda Baumgarten, Curator of Textiles at Colonial Williamsburg, for her valuable insights on the design and use of table coverings in early America. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 68. 20. As quoted in Reinhardt, “The work of Fancy and Taste,” p. 5. For the definition of “drapery,” see the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary at http://dictionary.oed.com. Two later works by Copley, Sylvester Gardiner (Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 309, pl. 75) and Joseph Hooper (Baltimore Museum of Art), show the sitters in the same Boston rococo side chair. Both men are depicted leaning on a small writing table covered with an ornate tablecloth, perhaps a wool damask. For information on Blackburn’s influence on Copley, see Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 22–24. Reinhardt, “The work of Fancy and Taste,” p. 6. For New York and English chairs similar to the Sherbrook example, see Kirk, American Furniture, figs. 870, 872, 873, and 877. Reynolds, Seven Discourses on Art. 21. Reinhardt, “The work of Fancy and Taste,” p. 6. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 99. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 31. Lovell, “Reading Eighteenth-Century American Portraits,” p. 247. 22. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, pp. 85–87. Analysis of the growing matricentrism in colonial portraits appears in Lovell, “Reading Eighteenth-Century American Portraits,” pp. 243–64. Claude Prosper Joylot de Crébillon, The Sofa: A Moral Tale (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd, 1927), p. 29. 23. Reinhardt, “The work of Fancy and Taste,” p. 4. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 290. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 79–80. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, pp. 297, 290–91, 95. Emily Neff, Copley in England (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), p. 18. Ilene Susan Fort and Michael J. Quick contend that these pillows document the period use of sofa cushions (American Art: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection [Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991], p. 96), but this author believes that the use of seat cushions and unconventional pose of the sitters represent yet another eye-catching conceit employed by Copley. 24. Copley reworked parts of Dorothy Quincy, notably the headdress, but no apparent changes were made to the chair (conservation research file, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The author is grateful to Eleanore Gadsden for her assistance with this research. Several English chairs with leather upholstery, ramp arms, and decorative nailing are recorded in early English furniture texts (see Hebert Cecinsky, English Furniture: From Gothic to Sheraton [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Dean-Hicks Company, 1929], p. 310), but there is no evidence that such forms were exported to America. 25. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 39. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, pp. 202, 200, 243 n. 3. 26. Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 248. 27. Ibid., pp. 66–67, 54. The authors of John Singleton Copley in America suggest that the table in the Lee and Hancock portraits may be derived from a print source such as Faber’s mezzotint engraving Queen Caroline or represent “a composite of the many Rococo pier tables that appear in Batty Langley’s pattern book of 1740, The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs” (p. 66). Copley’s use of a print source for this table is far more likely given the ample evidence showing the direct influence of prints in his art and lack of documentation regarding the direct use of architectural pattern books for furniture designs in colonial American portraiture. 28. According to label copy accompanying the painting in a 2004 display at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard Univerity, Copley also added the semicircular colonnaded peristyle in the background and altered the pose of Hancock’s left arm, which originally was bent to hold the tricorner hat. 29. Morning Chronicle, London, April 26, 1777, as quoted in Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1: 263. John Singleton Copley to Henry Pelham, November 6, 1771, as quoted in Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, p. 292. Jules David Prown informed the author that Theodore Stebbins earlier suggested some of these differences. 30. Kornhauser, Ralph Earl, pp. 237–39, pl. 67. Helen Cooper, John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982), pp. 76–81. The author is grateful to Nancy Goyne Evans for sharing her research on furniture originally used in the assembly room. 31. Lovell, “Reading Eigtheenth-Century American Family Portraits,” p. 251.