Turned and carved front legs and acanthus-carved Grecian scrolled arm fronts provide a stylistic update and an interesting adaptation of the basic easy chair form introduced more than a century earlier. Traditionally a bedchamber form made for use by the elderly, many easy chairs were originally fitted out under the seat with a removable board with circular hole to receive a chamber pot (see B.60.93). Surviving moldings under the seat indicate such was the case for the Bayou Bend example.

Technical notes: Mahogany (legs); ash (seat rails), yellow-poplar (narrow strip inside right seat rail).

Related examples: A very similar example without the leaf carving in the arm fronts, also fitted out as a commode chair, is at Winterthur (acc. no. 88.14); an example thought to be from New York or New England is in a private collection in Natchez, Mississippi (Cooper 1993, p. 216, fig. 173).

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.