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Photo: Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art, The Faith P. and Charles L. Bybee Collection, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ross Perot, 1985.B.15
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Backstool

Object number

RIF907

Maker

Maker Unknown

Dimensions

41 7/8 × 22 × 18 3/8 in. (106.363 × 55.88 × 46.673 cm) Seat height: 16 in. (40.64 cm)

Date

1730–50

Current location

Dallas Museum of Art

Geography

Probably made in Massachusetts, formerly said to have been made in Newport, Rhode Island
(view a map of Rhode Island)

Medium

American black walnut (primary); soft maple (rear legs, back and side stretchers, stay rail); eastern white pine (toilet seat blocks and slip seat frame)

Inscriptions

The front seat rail is incised "IIII"

Style

Queen Anne

Provenance

Possibly James Lovell Little, Sr. (1810–1889), Boston and Marshfield, Massachusetts, about 1830; by descent to his son, James Lovell Little, Jr. (1845–1914), Brookline, Massachusetts; by descent to his daughter Laura Revere Little (1876–1947), Massachusetts; sold by her estate, ca. 1940; by descent in the Little family, Matthews Court House, Virginia, before 1953. John S. Walton, New York, 1953; sold to Faith P. Bybee (1900–1996) and Charles L. Bybee (1900–1972), Houston, 1954; sold by Faith P. Bybee to the Dallas Museum of Art, 1985

Associated names

James Lovell Little, Sr.
James Lovell Little, Jr.
Laura Revere Little
Charles L. Bybee
Faith P. Bybee
John S. Walton, Inc.

Construction

This chair is joined with pinned, mortise-and-tenon construction. The turned stretchers have rectangular tenons on their ends. The structure of the back was not examined. The inner surfaces of the seat rails are roughly relieved. There are no traces of glue blocks. Six small, rectangular blocks on the inner surface of the rail supported a toilet seat frame. Source: Charles L. Venable, American Furniture in the Bybee Collection (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1989), 30, no. 12.

Related objects

Bibliography

"John S. Walton advertisement," Antiques 64, no. 6 (December 1953): 426, ill.
Ralph E. Carpenter, Jr., The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1820 (Newport, R.I.: Preservation Society of Newport County, 1954), 49, no. 23, ill.
Joan Pearson Watkins Revocable Trust, "American Antiques in the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Bybee, Part II," Antiques 93, no. 1 (January 1968): 80, ill.
Joan Pearson Watkins Revocable Trust and Elizabeth Bidwell Bates, American Furniture:1620 to the Present (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981), 107.
Charles L. Venable, American Furniture in the Bybee Collection (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 28-30, no. 12, Accession no. 1985.B15, ill.