The English designer Robert Manwaring was one of Thomas Chippendale’s most prominent contemporaries. Manwaring’s pattern books had a far greater impact on the cabinet trade in New England than did Chippendale’s or any other publication. The Bayou Bend side chair, reminiscent of Manwaring’s designs, relates even more closely to English examples. Remarkably, this chair, its seven mates, and the related settee (B.69.361.1) have remained intact, illustrative of the eighteenth-century fashion to furnish a room en suite and symmetrically. 

Technical notes: Mahogany; birch (slip seats). The construction follows the standard New England practice of the period (see B.57.75). The front seat rails are all stamped, B.69.361.2, VIII; B.69.361.3, IIII;  B.69.361.4, III; B.69.361.5, I; B.69.361.6, II; B.69.361.7, IV; B.69.361.8, V; and B.69.361.9, VII.

Related examples: Keyes 1925; Downs 1952, no. 152; Randall 1965, pp. 180, 182, no. 143; Sack 1969–92, vol. I, p. 243, no. 605; Greenlaw 1974, pp. 62–63, no. 54; Fales 1976, pp. 53–55, nos. 92–96; Kane 1976, pp. 146–50, nos. 124–28; Fairbanks et al. 1981, p. 602; Weidman 1984, pp. 51–52, no. 7; Jobe and Kaye 1984, pp. 381–89, nos. 109–12; another belongs to the Bostonian Society (acc. no. 1898.22).

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988.