Detailed with gold urns and foliage, this black caned chair illustrates the art of Baltimore painted furniture.  Although similar chairs in Yale’s Garven Collection hailed from Philadelphia, the example on display here has a Maryland provenance.  By the 1790s, Baltimore had emerged as a leader of American furniture innovation.  Cabinetmakers experimented with delicate, light wood inlays and restrained but expressive design forms.  In the first years of the 19th century, a wild interest in “fancy” painted furniture was born with a ready supply of Baltimore artists and craftsmen waiting in the wings.  The trend for painted furniture was so popular that Baltimore immigrant cabinetmakers John and Hugh Finlay produced sofas for the newest and most fashionable house in America—the White House.  Still, more modest homes could exhibit fancy chairs and sofas, some with delicate sprigs and urns, others with elaborate renditions of the owner’s townhouse or plantation.  As always, the style of painting reflected the skill of the artist as well as the pocketbooks of individual patrons.