Side chair

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This early Federal-style chair with a shield back and carved bannister (that incorporates the three-feather plume borrowed from the heraldic crest of the Prince of Wales) represents a popular form made in New York City in the 1790s. George Shipley was among the earliest New York cabinetmakers to embrace the form and illustrated a chair with a Prince of Wales feather back similar to the example here in his March 15, 1790 announcement placed in the “New York Daily Advertiser”. Such Prince of Wales feathers are also found on chairs made in Connecticut, and less frequently on Rhode Island examples. The bottom seat rail bears a pencil inscription with the name, “Mr. Lawrence,” which supports the provenance that the chair descended in the family of Captain James Lawrence (1781-1813). A naval hero of the War of 1812, Lawrence was mortally wounded when his ship the USS Chesapeake engaged the British frigate Shannon in Boston Harbor. Too young to have been the original owner, Lawrence probably acquired this chair, which must have been part of a larger set, through inheritance or at auction.

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