“I know of no other chair like the single [sic] ‘lyre back’ one. . . . I certainly recognize it as a Boston chair considering all the individual elements, but the combination is particularly elegant.” So wrote noted scholar of Boston furniture Page Talbott when a set of four chairs of this design originally surfaced in the 1980s. Although the existence of four chairs in a specific pattern might imply that the chairs were originally part of a larger set, no additional chairs of this form have appeared in the intervening years.
The lyre became a popular motif during the Neo-Classical period, and is frequently encountered as the back splat of klismos chairs, in no example more familiar than in a group of Duncan Phyfe chairs...
Category
Antique 1820s American Neoclassical Chairs