Side chair

This early Federal-style chair with a shield back and carved bannister (that incorporates the three-feather plume borrowed from the heraldic crest of the Prince of Wales) represents a popular form made in New York City in the 1790s. George Shipley was among the earliest New York cabinetmakers to embrace the form and illustrated a chair with a Prince of Wales feather back similar to the example here in his March 15, 1790 announcement placed in the “New York Daily Advertiser”. Such Prince of Wales feathers are also found on chairs made in Connecticut, and less frequently on Rhode Island examples. The bottom seat rail bears a pencil inscription with the name, “Mr. Lawrence,” which supports the provenance that the chair descended in the family of Captain James Lawrence (1781-1813). A naval hero of the War of 1812, Lawrence was mortally wounded when his ship the USS Chesapeake engaged the British frigate Shannon in Boston Harbor. Too young to have been the original owner, Lawrence probably acquired this chair, which must have been part of a larger set, through inheritance or at auction.