A pair of distinctive chairs from Newport, Rhode Island

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1994 by Nancy Goyne Evans

The pair of late eighteenth-century Newport chairs shown in Plates I and II was described as having descended in the Bangs family of Newport when they were bought in 1959 by the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware. The provenance was based on information provided in 1951 by Ruth Montague Sturgis, the last Bangs family descendant to own the chairs. A careful reading of the penciled note accompanying the chairs suggests that they descended in the maternal line of Ruth Sturgis's family and did not come into the possession of the Bangs family until late in the nineteenth century. The note reads: This chair is one of a set given to my mother MGE before she was married in 1815--made by [crossed out] made for my grandmother KE--before she was married in 1792 in Newport--from maho[g]any wood grown on the plantation of her brother James Almy--in Nassau NP West Indies now mine--MEB

I have identified "MEB" as Mary Ellery Jennison, who married John Bangs in 1847 (see Fig. 6). She was the daughter of Mary Gould Ellery ("MGE") and Samuel Jennison, who were married in 1815 and lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was the director of the Worcester Bank and the first librarian of the American Antiquarian Society. Mary Gould Ellery Jennison was the eldest child of Katharine Almy and Edmund Trowbridge Ellery of Newport and Providence, Rhode Island.(1) Katharine Almy Ellery was the great-great-granddaughter of Walter Clarke, a governor of Rhode Island. Edmund Trowbridge Ellery was the son of William Ellery, a delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Edmund Ellery's grandfather, also William Ellery, was a wealthy Newport merchant, a judge, and a deputy governor of Rhode Island.(2)

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The first owner of the chairs was Katharine Almy Ellery, and by tradition they were made before her marriage in 1792. The inscription "Amy" on both slip seats is probably a phonetic spelling of Almy, written by the chairmaker or the upholsterer. Although Mary Ellery Jennison Bangs's note says that the wood came from James Almy's plantation in Nassau on New Providence, one of the Bahama Islands, James Almy would have been only twenty in 1792. In that year he married Martha Matilda Bowles of Christ Church Parish, New Providence, so the plantation may in fact have belonged to his wife's family.(3)

The note also identifies the wood of which the chairs are made as mahogany, but it is actually sabicu, a West Indian timber valued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for its hardness and durability.(4) It was merchandised as a type of mahogany known as "horseflesh" for its rich, reddishbronze color. The wood was referred to as "Bahama mahogany" as late as 1851 at the Great Exhibition in London.

In 1784 Johann David Schoepf (1752-1800), a German physician and scientist, commented on the mahogany harvest in the Bahama Islands:

The mahogany wood which is sent from this and the other West India islands does by no means come from one and the same variety of tree.... Several kinds of Mimosa and perhaps other related trees are marketed under this name. Thus it happens that so many different sorts of mahogany wood are found in merchants' warehouses and in artists' work-rooms. An uncommon sort is called here, from its color and coarse wood-fibre, the "Horse-flesh Mahogany." Another kind, paler in color, is the so-called Madeira wood, but this also passes in Europe for mahogany.(5)

The Newport chairs are part of a sizable group of Rhode Island and New York City chairs with back posts, or stiles, that curve inward not far above the seat and a crest rail that is pronouncedly rounded in profile. The splats vary in pattern and the backs are occasionally broad. The similarity of the Rhode Island and New York chairs is not surprising given the ease of coastal trading between the two places.(6)

The simplest back pattern in this group of chairs has posts that sweep inward and a solid splat with rounded lobes near the top (see Pl. IV) and sometimes also near the bottom (see Fig. 1). The most ornate have a carved shell centered in the crest. (These also usually have shells carved on the knees.) Characteristic of the Rhode Island chairs are seat rails with a flat arch, blocked and chamfered rear legs with squared feet, ogee-profile knee brackets, blocked and turned stretchers, and deeply webbed claw-and-ball feet (see Pl. IV). New York City characteristics are straight seat rails, tapered rear legs with squared feet and no stretchers, knee brackets with scrolled ends, and compressed claw-and-ball feet (see Fig. 1).

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Between about 1755 and 1760 the pierced splat was introduced. The bold Rhode Island interpretation of the common pierceddiamond and Y-shaped motif is shown in Plates VI and VIa. This chair is from a large set, now scattered, that was made in Newport, as is indicated by the low-relief anthemion-type motif carved on the knees.(7) The splat on the chairs in Plates I and II is an ornate interpretation of this pattern, with interlaced C-scrolls uniting the splat and crest and eliminating the large T-shaped bridge at the top of the splat on the chair in Plates VI and VIa. The splat pattern of interlaced C-scrolls is rarely found in combination with back posts that curve inward.(8) Most Rhode Island chairs of this pattern have straight back posts (see Fig. 5), although these too are uncommon. Providence craftsmen may have produced the latter, for they vary in several respects from their Newport counterparts: the backs are broader, the triangular piercings in the crest are larger, the arch of the seat rails is shallower, the front legs end in pads on disks, and the primary wood is walnut.