image of object
Photo: Courtesy The Chipstone Foundation, Fox Point, Wis., accession no. 1955.14; photo by Gavin Ashworth
Click the image to enlarge

Easy chair

Object number

RIF770

Maker

Maker Unknown
Maker, formerly attributed to John Goddard, American, 1723?1785

Dimensions

49 × 29 × 18 1/2 in. (124.46 × 73.66 × 46.99 cm)

Date

ca. 1955

Current location

The Chipstone Foundation

Geography

Made in Rhode Island
(view a map of Rhode Island)

Medium

Mahogany, maple, and white pine

Marks

Unknown

Inscriptions

Unknown

Style

Chippendale

Provenance

John S. Walton, New York; sold to Polly Mariner Stone (1898–1995) and Stanley Stone (1896–1987), Fox Point, Wisconsin, 1955; bequeathed by Stanley Stone to The Chipstone Foundation, Fox Point, Wisconsin, 1987

Associated names

John S. Walton, Inc.
Polly Mariner Stone
Stanley Stone

Construction

The crest rail wraps around the top and the inner sides of the stiles; the front and side seat rails overlap the front legs and are penetrated by a dowel extending from the legs; the rear legs are of mahogany and are spliced with the back stiles just above the level of the seat rails. Source: Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 204.

Notes

Although once published as an eighteenth-century Rhode Island easy chair, this chair has been determined to be twentieth century.

Bibliography

James Biddle, American Art from American Collections: Decorative Arts, Paintings, and Prints of the Colonial and Federal Periods from Private Collections, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1963), 20, no. 39, ill.
Stanley Stone, "Rhode Island Furniture at Chipstone, Part I," Antiques 91, no. 2 (February 1967): 209.
Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 204–205, no. 94, ill.
Luke Beckerdite and Alan Miller, "Furniture Fakes from the Chipstone Collection," American Furniture (2002): 60–63, fig. 11, 13–14, 16.