AFA Summer 2020

Summer 70 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Child’s chair, New Bedford, Mass.,1815–1820. Various woods, whalebone, baleen, mother-of-pearl, and walrus ivory, 29⅛ x 14⅜ x 17⅛ inches. Museum purchase, made possible by the John Robinson Endowment Fund (2015.53.1). Exuberant scrimshaw adorns this chair’s splat and crest like froth on a wave. It is among the finest expressions of the whaleman’s art made in America, distinctive for the wood, bone, tusk, and shell likely collected on a Pacific voyage. Gideon Howland Jr., a Massachusetts whaling captain, probably commissioned the piece as a gift for his daughter Sylvia Ann, whose name appears in the whalebone plaque on its crest.