Armchair

Thomas Chippendale

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This enormous armchair is ambitious in both scale and design. Its bold contours are enabled by the dense mahogany that came from the colonized West Indies. Distinct in its beautiful grain and light-reflecting sheen, mahogany became eighteenth-century Britain’s medium of magnificence, its “national wood.” Thomas Chippendale’s design for this “French Chair,” published in The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754), specified that it “must be covered with Tapestry, or other sort of Needlework.” Here, the needlework depicts a scene of the Annunciation, the feast day when contracts for trades and craftspeople were renegotiated.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art