This low spindle-back chair represents the turner’s alternative to the more expensive upholstered, so-called Cromwellian, chair introduced to the Continent and England in the early seventeenth century. It is part of a group of American chairs that differs considerably from the spindle-back chairs of New England, reflecting a type com­mon in the Netherlands and northwest­ern Germany. Salient features include the low back, urn-shaped finials, and long, ovoid, sausagelike turnings seen on the stretchers and back spindles. These dis­tinctive sausage turnings do not appear on contemporaneous New England furni­ture but are seen on a group of chairs thought to be from New York. A table also at Bayou Bend, possibly from New York or New Jersey, displays similar sausage turnings (B.22.18). The urn finials appear on later slat-back chairs associated with New Jersey. Finally, the style of the conjoined initials HH branded on the chair, like those of a closely related pair, resembles that seen on furniture with histories of New York Dutch owner­ship. All these factors point to the area of Dutch settlement as the origin for this group of chairs.

Technical notes: Cherry; unidentified secondary woods. Conjoined double H is branded on right rear stile, a portion of the left front foot is missing, finish and rushing are very old but not original.

Related examples: MMA; other examples differ in some details, particularly the number of back spindles: a pair at Sleepy Hollow Restorations, Tarrytown, New York, with five spindles and branded with conjoined Hs on the right rear stile may be from the same set (Butler 1983, p. 52, no. 35); a pair at New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, with five spindles and branded HG on the right rear stile (Lenape 1971, p. 44, no. 106); one in a private collection, Milwaukee, with a taller back and five spindles; American Art Association, An­derson Galleries, New York, Garvan Collec­tion sale, January 8–10, 1931, lot 107, with five spindles; Sotheby’s, New York, sale 6589, June 23, 1994, lot 432, with five spindles; private col­lection, Vermont, with a taller back and five spindles; Winterthur (Forman 1988, nos. 11, 12), two with four spindles; Nutting 1962, no. 2085, with four spindles; American Museum in Britain, Bath (Huitson 1993, p. 411), with four spindles; Yale (Kane 1976, no. 5), with three spindles. The only related armchair has ovoid bobbin turnings, its back with two vertically stacked rows of six spindles (Blackburn et al. 1988, p. 175, fig. 189); a child’s side chair, DAPC (acc. no. 82.159).

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, 1998.