In response to competition from im­ported London-made caned seating furni­ture, Boston chairmakers and turners began producing their own cane products at the beginning of the eighteenth cen­tury. This armchair, with its molded stiles, represents a late type; indeed, the yoke design of the crest anticipates the later Baroque treatment. The turned rear legs, centrally placed medial stretcher, and high front and rear stretchers, all features that derive from English caned chair de­sign, differentiate this type of chair from the treatment seen on the banister-back chair Bend (see B.58.106) The Bayou Bend armchair bears a punched capital I with a central cross serif on the back seat rail. No fewer than twenty-six other Boston caned chairs bearing the same device are now known.

Technical notes: Soft maple, birch (rear seat rail). All four feet have new pieces, which replaced losses when the chair was converted into a rocker. At one time, the chair was up­holstered over the back and seat, as evidenced by nail holes. The caning is not original, nor is the reddish-grained paint. A paint sample shows that this black-and-red graining overlies a brown ground layer (applied rapidly, judging from the large number and size of air holes), which covered the wood and the remnants of an earlier brown paint film.

Related examples: The closest is a side chair with identical crest in the collection of the Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massa­chusetts. A chair almost identical was adver­tised by Ginsburg and Levy (Antiques 126 [October 1984], p. 656). A single chair was exhibited at the Bernard and S. Dean Levy Gallery, New York, in 1988 (Levy Gallery 1988b, p. 9); another was advertised by Peter H. Eaton Antiques, Newton Junction, New Hampshire (Antiques 123 [March 1983], p. 530).

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.