Armchair

Thomas Chippendale

ca. 1755 · Mahogany, needlework · European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

This enormous armchair is ambitious in both scale and design. Its bold contours are enabled by the dense mahogany that came from the colonized West Indies. Distinct in its beautiful grain and light-reflecting sheen, mahogany became eighteenth-century Britain’s medium of magnificence, its “national wood.” Thomas Chippendale’s design for this “French Chair,” published in The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754), specified that it “must be covered with Tapestry, or other sort of Needlework.” Here, the needlework depicts a scene of the Annunciation, the feast day when contracts for trades and craftspeople were renegotiated.

Artist

Thomas Chippendale

Date

ca. 1755

Medium

Mahogany, needlework

Culture

British

Department

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Credit line

Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964