Spindle-back chair

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This chair, ornamented with turnings of repeated barrel, flattened ball, and baluster shapes, is of a distinctive type associated with areas of Dutch cultural influence in New York and northern New Jersey. Its overall design and turned motifs, including the urn-and-flame finials, are based on a form of chair that was popular in the Netherlands during the second half of the seventeenth century. This type of turned chair derived its basic format from that of fashionable seventeenth-century upholstered chairs.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art