attributed to James Graham Boston, 1760-1770, with finely carved crest and pierced splat, leaf carved knees, very finely rendered ball and claw feet, fitted with a sittable, non-intrusive upholstery system fabricated and installed by Leroy Graves, with silk damask upholstery with brass nailing in the original pattern, 38 x 21 x 22 in.

Provenance: Property from the Collection of Dudley and Constance Godfrey

Note: New England furniture based on designs in eighteenth-century pattern books is extremely rare. This chair is one of at least five identical examples (Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art [pair], Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with backs derived from plate 13 in the first and second editions of Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director (1754, 1755). Furniture scholar Kemble Widmer has attributed this group of seating to Scottish immigrant James Graham (1728-1808). Graham appears to have arrived in Boston by the summer of 1754. He married Jane Freeland, daughter of cabinetmaker William Freeman in 1760, and is listed in Boston tax and census records between 1760 and 1780. In the latter, he is described as a "chairmaker" (Kemble Widmer, A Scotsman, Thomas Chippendale, and the Green Dragon Tavern, Boston Furniture and Its Makers, 1650-1860, edited by Brock Joe and Gerald W. R. Ward (Boston, Colonial Society of Massachusetts).