Summer 2017

Chairmaking was a staple of Portsmouth’s furniture-making industry for much of the eighteenth century. Chairs featuring the design elements seen in this example—the distinctive carved crest rail, vase-shaped splat, shaped skirt, ball-and-ring front stretcher, and turned legs ending in Spanish feet—are associated with John Gaines III, a craftsman trained by his father in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and active in Portsmouth in the second quarter of the century. Key specimens in this attribution are chairs at Strawbery Banke Museum (1998.125) with a history in the Gaines/Brewster family. This chair was from the collection of the famed collector Mitchell M. Taradash (1889–1973). Like many objects misnamed “transitional” by some authors, or termed “compromise solutions” by others, chairs such as this one exhibit characteristics of more than one of the international styles popular in the period. From the waist down, it could well be from the William and Mary period, while from the seat up it makes a nod to the Queen Anne aesthetic in its solid splat and yoke-shaped crest rail, while still retaining a carved crest that is almost an abstracted echo of the more elaborate carving found on earlier chairs. Such idiosyncratic combinations are popular in many provincial and rural areas. Fig. 2: Side chair, attributed to John Gaines III (1704–1743). Portsmouth, 1735–1740. H. 39⅞, W. 18¼, D. 19 in. Collection of Craig and Alison Jewett. Photo by Ralph Morang. 2017 Antiques & Fine Art 125