Object Details
One from a Set of Six Loockerman Family Chippendale Carved Walnut Side Chairs
ca. 1755-1770
One from a Set of Six Loockerman Family Chippendale Carved Walnut Side Chairs
ca. 1755-1770
One from a Set of Six Loockerman Family Chippendale Carved Walnut Side Chairs
ca. 1755-1770
One from a Set of Six Loockerman Family Chippendale Carved Walnut Side Chairs
ca. 1755-1770
One from a Set of Six Loockerman Family Chippendale Carved Walnut Side Chairs
ca. 1755-1770
One of Six Chippendale Carved Mahogany Side Chairs
ca. 1750-1770
One of Six Chippendale Carved Mahogany Side Chairs
ca. 1750-1770
One of Six Chippendale Carved Mahogany Side Chairs
ca. 1750-1770
One of Six Chippendale Carved Mahogany Side Chairs
ca. 1750-1770
One of Six Chippendale Carved Mahogany Side Chairs
ca. 1750-1770
One of Six Chippendale Carved Mahogany Side Chairs
ca. 1750-1770
One from a Set of Six Loockerman Family Chippendale Carved Walnut Side Chairs
ca. 1755-1770
Chippendale Carved and Figured Mahogany Side Chair
ca. 1755-1775
Object Essay
Made for the Loockerman family of Dover, Delaware, this armchair and six matched side chairs (also in the Department of State collection) constitute one of the largest and most elaborate sets of American Chippendale-style chairs to have survived intact. They are probably the set referred to in the 1785 inventory of Vincent Loockerman’s estate as “6 leather bottomed Walnut chairs (old)” valued as 15s. apiece and “1 Ditto Arm chair” as 22s.6d. in “the blue room upstairs.”1Published in Conger and Rollins, Treasures of State, cat. no. 17 (Acc. No. 73.19, 71.8, 71.9, 71.20, 71.21, 71.22). See also Sack Collection, 3: 616–17; Antiques 96, no. 6 (December 1969): inside cover; Sack 1987, 162. Another set of Loockerman chairs is in the Collection; see Conger and Rollins, Treasures of State, cat. no. 77 (Acc. No. 75.41). Other Loockerman furniture is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see Philadelphia: Three Centuries, cat. no. 101, for a table). Others were sold at Sotheby’s, New York, sale 5295, February 2, 1985. See also Philip D. Zimmerman, “Queen Anne and Chippendale Chairs in Delaware,” Antiques 160, no. 3 (September 2001): 331–39, for a discussion of five sets of Loockerman chairs, including the Collection’s chairs, from both Philadelphia and Delaware.
The chairs were expensive because they have several costly optional elements, such as “cut-through” and “relieved” (carved) banisters, “leaves on the knees” carved crest and seat rails, and fluted stiles. These and other options correspond to those on the best work itemized in contemporary Philadelphia cabinetmakers’ price books.2Weil, 182. Armchairs typically cost at least one pound more than side chairs, and chairs made of walnut generally cost slightly less than those made of imported mahogany.
An odd aspect of the armchair is the absence of scroll carving on the outer sides of the hand rests. Another unusual detail on this and several stylistically related chairs is the prominent “pins” at the tops of the stiles between the fluting and the carved ears. Occurring on either side of a structural joint, they imitate pins that might secure a spline joint. These, however, are carved from the solid and are purely ornamental.
Because trades such as carving and upholstery tended to be highly specialized, large urban cabinet shops often hired independent carvers on a piecework basis. Several other chairs of this same design vary slightly in the way the carved vine passes below the shell on the crest rail and in the method of articulating the shell ears.3For examples with minor variations, see Monkhouse and Michie, cat. nos. 110–111; Antiques 107, no. 4 (April 1975): 626; and Anderson Galleries, New York, Jacob Paxson Temple Collection, sale 1626, January 23–28, 1922, lot 1661. Such differences indicate different carvers, or even different workshops, responding to a common model, and they confound attribution to an individual maker based upon carving.
Related chairs have been attributed to Thomas Affleck on the strength of a chair that descended in the Hollingsworth and Morris families of Philadelphia.4The Hollingsworth-Morris chair is illustrated in Hornor 1935, pl. 220. Vincent Loockerman is known to have purchased furniture in 1774 from another leading Philadelphia cabinetmaker, Benjamin Randolph, to whom Harold Sack has attributed this set. As Morrison H. Heckscher has pointed out, however, the Department of State’s chairs are stylistically datable to the mid-1760s and are unlike known labeled examples by Randolph.5See Heckscher 1985, cat. no. 48, for an identical chair. Compare the Wistar family armchair, illustrated in Hornor 1935, pl. 154. The restrained shaping of the arms and their supports likewise suggests this earlier dating.
Thomas S. Michie
Excerpted from Jonathan L. Fairbanks. Becoming a Nation: Americana from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State. New York: Rizzoli, 2003.