Jan and John Maggs Antiques

A fabulous chair comes home

Not long after we launched our antiques business, we purchased the chair pictured above from another dealer. We loved its form and its decoration, its bold double-tombstone crest and complex finials, and its fascinating paint history. Even though the years had robbed it of much of its decoration and one-third of its seat height, it spoke to us, and we had to have it. At the time, we thought we might rebuild its height and restore its useful life.

Several years later, the chair was unaltered, due largely, we realized, to our unwillingness to defile its purity.

A friend, a serious collector of early painted furniture, saw it in the barn one day and asked if it was for sale. We agreed that it probably should be, since we'd neither sold it or added it to our own collection. He purchased it for what we had paid for it, telling us that he would take it to his restorer.

We forgot about the chair until several years later, when our friend pulled into the driveway with the chair in his back seat and asked, "Remember that painted banister back chair I bought from you? We love it, but we need to be able to sit on it, and it's way too short. And we can't bring ourselves to end it out."

We bought the chair back and placed it immediately in our front hall, where it has lived ever since. Despite the fact that it is too short to be comfortable for any but children and cats, it is one of our most prized possessions.

A postscript of clarification. We believe that ending out a chair is not always wrong. (Click here for a brief discussion of the reasons why.) We've bought many ended out chairs and have ended out a few ourselves. But this painted banister back has set the standard for us. While it's in our care, it will never be altered.

Photo courtesy of Country Home Magazine

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