Very Fine and Rare Chippendale Shell-Carved and Figured Mahogany Compass-Seat Roundabout Armchair, New York, Circa 1770

Constructed of vibrantly figured mahogany and with cabriole arm supports, a compass seat and four cabriole shell-carved legs with ball-and-claw feet, this New York roundabout chair would have been amongst the most expensive variations of the rare form. The vasiform splat with heart-and-diamond piercing is a motif found on several New York chairs. The closest chair in form is a chair that originally was owned by Matthais Burnett (1749-1806) of Jamaica, New York and is in the Bayou Bend collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.¹ Another chair in the same collection is closely related but has interlaced pierced splats and only the central leg with a flower and leaf carving.² Two related roundabout chairs with pierced interlaced-and-diamond splats are known. One in the Hipkiss collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and another, with history in the Ganesevoort-Lansing familes of Albany, New York, is in a private collection.³ Two related chairs with their front legs ornamented with acanthus carvings are also known. One is in the collection of Winterthur Museum and the other in a private collection.⁴ 

The most unique aspect of this form of chair is the chairmaker's use of a double cyma motif on the shoes of the chair and the use of a cyma on the transition on the arms to the paddle terminus. The use of this ornament is found first on Queen Anne Boston side chairs and subsequently on Queen Anne Baroque chairs made in New York.⁵

¹ David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff, American Decorative arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection, (Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 54, no. F92.

² Warren et. al., pp. 54-5, no. F93.

³ Edwin J. Hipkiss, Eighteenth-century American Arts: The M and M Karolik Collection, (Cambridge, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 144-5, no. 82 and Israel Sack Inc., Opportunities in American Antiques, P6779 (https://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:846210)

⁴ Joseph Down, American Furniture: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods, ((New York: The MacMillan Company, 1952), no. 66 and Jeffery Tillou Antiques advertisement, The 1998 Philadelphia Antique Show brochure.

⁵ Downs, nos. 26 and 105 and Leigh Keno, Joan Barzilay Freund, and Alan Miller, “The Very Pink of the Mode: Boston Georgian Chairs, Their Export, and Their Influence,” American Furniture 1996, editor Luke Beckerdite, (Milwaukee, WI, Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 289-92, figs. 38 and 42.