The Important J. Insley Blair Pilgrim Century Turned Maple and Ash 'Mushroom-Arm' Slat-Back Armchair, Norwich or Lebanon, Connecticut, Circa 1700

J. Insley Blair, Tudor Park, New York;
Philip Budrose, Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Wallace Nutting, Furniture of the Pilgrim Century: 1620-1720, (Framingham, MA: Old America Company, 1924), pp. 313, 323;
Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, (New York: MacMillian Publishing Co., Inc., 1928), no. 1887.

This impressive armchair is one of approximately a dozen surviving first-generation mushroom pommeled armchairs from the Norwich area (see Albert Sack, The New Fine Points of Furniture: Early American, Good, Better, Best, Superior, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), p. 24; David B. Warren, American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection, (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 2-3, no. F2; Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630-1730: An Interpretive Catalogue, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), pp. 124-28; Barry A. Greenlaw, New England Furniture at Williamsburg, (Williamsburg, VA; distributed by University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 1974), no. 33; Irving Whitall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England : A Study of the Domestic Furniture in Use in the Seventeenth, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), fig. 58; Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), no. 74).