In general, wealthy families in and around Boston in the early years of the nineteenth century chose homes, paintings, furniture, silver, glass, and other decorative accessories that were distinguished, yet unpretentious, elegant, yet chaste, fashionable, yet not avant garde. Unlike the artistic production of New York and Philadelphia, where showiness and extravagance were encouraged, the furniture of Boston and its environs tended to be restrained and tasteful, consisting of a limited but aesthetically pleasing vocabulary of form and ornament.
One of the signature forms of furniture of the Neo-Classical period in the United States is the klismos chair as interpreted by a group of Boston cabinetmakers in the period beginning about
1820 (see Page Talbott, “Seating Furniture in Boston, 1810-1835,” in The Magazine Antiques CXXXIX [May 1991], pp. 966ff.). These chairs are usually characterized by sabre legs at the front and back and curved crest rails typically enriched with flaming mahogany veneers, their ends often punctuated by stylized leaves, anthemia, or scrolls, and center splats decorated with
leaves, drapery, lyres, etc. Just as it is easy to identify a New York or Philadelphia side, or dining, chair of the period, so Boston chairs have a certain “look” that sets them apart from
chairs from all other cabinetmaking centers in this period.
This chair is one of an extremely small number of Boston chairs that is labeled or stamped by its maker or retailer. On the underside of the original slip seat, which retains not only all of its original horsehair stuffing but also its original red gauffraged velvet showcover, is the label of William Hancock, who describes himself as an “UPHOLSTERER,” but also notes that he “keeps constantly on hand, an extensive assortment of Furniture,” the forms of which he then lists and, further, offers “Furniture made to order, equal to any manufactured in the city.” It is thus impossible to determine at this time whether Hancock’s role in the present chair was merely that of upholsterer, whether this was one of the “chairs” offered in his “Furniture Warehouse,” or whether it was indeed “made to order.” Under any circumstances, it is a chair of exceptional quality that also has the added distinction of retaining its original wax finish, its original label, and its original underupholstery and show fabric.
Hancock's firm spent its first six years, 1819 to 1825, on Orange Street and then moved to Market Street (later Cornhill), where the firm would see its most successful years. Originally located at numbers 39 and 41 Market Street, by 1829 the firm had expanded to include numbers 37 to 53. In 1836, Hancock went into business with Holden and Adams, with whom he worked until 1837. While Hancock is listed in the business directories of Boston until 1849, little is known about his career after the dissolution of Hancock, Holden, and Adams. Thus, the addresses of 39, 41, 45, and 49 Market Street on the label of this chair indicate a date for it after 1829.
Indeed, although this chair follows a very familiar Boston type, Hancock was clearly using Thomas King’s The Modern Style of Cabinet Work Exemplified, which was published in that same year, and which is known to have been owned in Eastern Massachusetts very shortly thereafter. The proportion and stance of the chair would seem to be derived from plate 15, the treatment of the front and back legs was likely taken from plate 16 which shows a group of “parlour chairs,” and plate 21 probably served as the model for the acanthus leaves that gracefully wrap around the corners of the crest rail. The chair retains its original stuffing and gauffraged red velvet or mohair show cover, the latter of which is, probably not coincidentally, very close to those on a set of Boston side chairs, possibly from the same shop, that belong to the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, Plymouth, Massachusetts, and are currently on loan to Shirley Place an historic house in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
