Leather chair

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

When the Boston upholsterer Thomas Fitch described chairs he was selling as “crook’d back” in early 1723, he was probably referring to side chairs similar to the one displayed here, which is still upholstered in its original, locally tanned leather. Promoted as the “newest fashiond,” the chair has a back panel with a shallow, serpentine curve that conformed to the sitter’s back and must have been a significant advance in seating comfort. Throughout the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the Boston chairmaking industry exported large numbers of these comfortable, practical 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