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New York Historical Society Museum & Library

New York Historical Society Collection Highlights

Furniture

The New-York Historical Society’s furniture holdings number more than 500 objects, including seating furniture, tables, case furniture, cradles, clocks and boxes ranging from a late seventeenth century Dutch kast to a pair of 1960s Bertoia chairs. The earliest acquisition, a chair made for Marie Antoinette’s private chambers at Versailles in 1779, was purchased by U.S. Minister to France Gouverneur Morris.

Highlights of the collection include George Washington’s inaugural armchair and Valley Forge camp bed, a rococo carved Philadelphia high chest, ten pieces of furniture used by the first United States Congress at Federal Hall, a lady’s cabinet dressing table owned in the Livingston family, the Abeel family French press made by French émigré Charles-Honoré Lannuier and the desk at which Clement Clarke Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

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Many of the New-York Historical Society’s founders and 19th-century members had deep roots in New York; a significant number of them descended from families who immigrated in the 17th century. These early members were also deeply committed to exploration, and as such, they collected and donated to the Historical Society many artifacts that help tell the story of the Age of Exploration, and its trajectory, which led to the Dutch founding and settling of New York.  Most of the objects illustrated here are rarely-seen, early treasures from the Historical Society’s collections, including its 1542 Ulpius globe, which documents Verrazano’s North American discoveries, an exceptional early-18th century hand-painted Indian wall hanging, 17th-century maps and renderings of New Amsterdam and New York and the only known portrait of Peter Stuyvesant painted during his lifetime.

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