Chair with “Grained” Finish

New England; 1750-1850; Maple, birch, ash, rush, paint; Gift of Constance McCann Belts, Helena Woolworth Guest, and Frasier W. McCann, 1942.3063.

Sleeper was less interested in a piece’s history than in its potential to visually delight. He displayed this maple side chair as a hybrid artifact, its original eighteenth-century surface “grained” in the nineteenth-century to resemble a more costly wood.