Side Chair

Duncan Phyfe

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This chair is part of a large suite of furniture that includes a sofa, a pair of armchairs, ten side chairs, and a pair of footstools. It was once owned by Thomas Cornell Pearsall, a wealthy New York merchant and shipowner. The attribution to the famed furniture maker Duncan Phyfe is based on a Pearsall family tradition and is recorded in an inscription stamped on the inside of the seat rails of the sofa and several chairs.

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