Side Chair

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This delicate side chair is part of a bedroom suite made for Elizabeth Love Marquand, the daughter of Henry Gurdon Marquand, second president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (see 1986.47.1-.4). The suite was used in her family's residence at Madison Avenue and Sixty-Eighth Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) and built between 1881 and 1884. When, in 1884, Elizabeth married Harold Godwin (grandson of the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant), she brought the bedroom suite with her to "Cedarmere," Godwin's family home on Long Island, where it remained until 1984. Although the suite exhibits American woods and was likely made in New York, the delicate and highly skilled carving of the Renaissance-style motifs suggests the work of a European-born craftsman. In contrast to the taste for flat surface decoration that dominated the 1870s, richly carved furniture such as this became fashionable about 1880.

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