Fine and Rare Child's Black-Painted Sack-Back Windsor Armchair, Probably Providence, Rhode Island, circa 1785

The turnings on this chair relate directly to those on a fan-back chair in the late IM Weiss collection and identified as being from Rhode Island (see Nancy Goyne Evans, American Windsor Chairs, (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1996), p. 255, fig. 6-27). The identical H. CATE brand appears on several pieces of Portsmouth, New Hampshire furniture.  The brand was for Henry Cate (1779-1817) who worked as a blacksmith in Portsmouth. For a comparison of the brand see Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast, Brock Jobe editor, (Boston, MA: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities; Hanover, NH: Distributed by University Press of New England, 1993), p. 427.