Leather chair

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This tall, flat-top, leather-upholstered chair marks the stylistic transition between the low seventeenth-century back stool and the Baroque-inspired, William and Mary style leather chair. Boston was home to colonial America’s earliest chairmaking industry. The later evolution of the Boston leather chair can be seen on an ornately carved William and Mary style crest rail (52.77.58) and the other with "Spanish" feet and an S-curved or "crook’ed back", precursor to the Queen Anne style (10.125.698).

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art