Pair Side Chairs with Lyre Backs, about 1825
Boston
|Mahogany (secondary woods: mahogany)
Each, 34 in. high, 19 in. wide, 22 1/4 in. deep (overall)
EX COLL.: [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1989]; to private collection, 1989–2000; to private collection, until the present
RECORDED: Stuart P. Feld, Boston in the Age of Neo-Classicism 1810–1840, exhib. cat. (New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1999), p. 59 no. 23 illus. in color; cf. Elizabeth Feld and Stuart P. Feld, Very Rich & Handsome: American Neo-Classical Decorative Arts, exhib. cat. (New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 2014), p.p. 82–83 illus. in color (a pair that descended with the present pair until 1987)
The lyre became a popular motif during the Neo-Classical period, and is frequently encountered as the back splat of klismos chairs, in no example more familiar than in a group of Duncan Phyfe chairs. In the present pair, however, the cabinetmaker has created a substantially larger and bolder lyre—and a noticeably larger chair—more in keeping with the grander and more archaeological approach of the mid-to-late 1820s, in contrast to the more delicate Phyfe sensitivity of the 1810s. Indeed, these chairs represent both a scale and a level of refinement that one rarely encounters in Boston chairs of this time.
The grander scale of these chairs, coupled also with the beautifully carved front legs and front and side seat rails boldly carved in an egg-and-dart motif, suggests that their cabinetmaker was looking to one of the many English design books that appeared during the Regency/William IV era, but the recent discovery in the private collection of the late Savannah, Georgia, dealer, Francis McNairy, of a set of six French side chairs with nearly identical lyre backsplats, and the appearance of a pair of side chairs with variant front legs and slight differences in the details of the lyre strongly suggest that the origin of the design may have been in a French rather than an English pattern book of the period.