THE FURNITURE HISTORY SOCIETY Newsletter No. 197 February 2015

A NOTE ABOUT THE MANNING CHAIR AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

Fig. 1 Manning Chair at Brown University, Spanish, c. 1700

Fig. 2 Manning chair, detail of tooled leather upholstery

Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is observing the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1764 with a special exhibition of its institutional relics. Chief among these is the Manning chair, in which presidents of the university are seated when they are inaugurated. Otherwise it is removed from the special case in which it is kept only on the occasion of Brown’s yearly commencement exercises. In a reference to the medieval tradition of ceremonial chairs, the Manning chair is intended to signify the authority of the university’s president (Fig. 1). A Spanish armchair dating from c. 1700 and upholstered in embossed leather and studded with brass tacks and bosses (Fig. 2), the Manning chair has long been associated with the founding president of the university, Rev. James Manning (1738–91). University tradition records that since his presidency it has been passed down to his successors in that office. So closely is the Manning chair associated with the presidents of Brown that several of them have been pictured with it in their official portraits (Fig. 3). Over the years the Manning chair has been revered at Brown not only because it is the oldest artifact associated with the founding of the institution, but also because its presence and ceremonial use on campus implies that the university is among a select group of American schools originating in the colonial era. Like the venerable chairs used by its colleague schools Harvard University and Yale University to symbolize the authority of their presidents, Brown University’s Manning chair invokes the ancient traditions of Europe and Great Britain of employing thrones both great and small as the visual evidence

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Fig. 3 Portrait of Brown University president Barnaby Keeney by John Lavalle 1957

of institutional power so well illustrated in the ‘Ceremonial Chairs’ exhibition at the V&A in 1994. It was, therefore, a matter of considerable interest at Brown when, a few years ago, the university’s archivist uncovered a letter written in 1848 by Stephen Hopkins Smith, grand- nephew and namesake of Brown University’s first chancellor Stephen Hopkins, a colonial governor of Rhode Island, accompanying Smith’s gift of the Spanish arm chair to Brown and detailing an entirely different history. The history of the old chair which I present to Brown University, once the property of Stephen Hopkins, who was the first chancellor of what was then R.I. College, is as follows. In the contest between Hopkins and Ward for the Chief Magistrary, with various success to each party, for a number of years, a friend of Gov. Hopkins, Benjamin Wickham, had an interest in a prize vessel, which was brought into Newport, onboard of which was this Spanish chair, designed as a present to the Gov. of one of the W. I. islands— Mr. Wickham presented it to Gov. Hopkins as a ‘Governors’ chair’ with the remark that he could occupy it without fear of being turned out by Ward. It was his favorite seat until the end of his life. Smith’s account reveals that the Manning Chair was never owned or used by James Manning. It did not come to the university during his presidency or the presidency of his next two successors. Apparently the ancient tradition of seating a leader in a great chair to symbolize institutional authority was not established at Brown until 1848, when the school was 84 years old and its founding president, whose name the chair bears, had been dead for 57 years.

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Fig. 4 Wood engraving of Harvard University presidential chair, from Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, 1840

By the time it actually acquired an ancient chair to emphasize the gravity of its official functions, Brown University was well-enough established to ally itself with an elite cadre of schools with comparable traditions and equipage. In its founding years in the eighteenth century this association would have been a stretch, but by the middle of the nineteenth century asserting peer status in what would later come to be called the Ivy League was a more reasonable aspiration for Brown. The impetus to acquire a presidential chair for Brown may have been sparked in 1841, when the President and Fellows of Harvard University presented the Brown University Library with a copy of Josiah Quincy’s 1840 History of Harvard University. Quincy’s history featured a description of the president’s chair at Harvard, accompanied by a wood engraving after a drawing by his daughter Eliza (Fig. 4). ‘The antique chair represented in this vignette has been used in the College for conferring degrees on Commencement day, for time beyond the memory of man,’ wrote Quincy. One can imagine his illustrated description of the venerable artifact whetted the appetite of the younger and smaller school for its own presidential chair. The ease with which the provenance of Brown’s newly-acquired chair soon began to encompass an apocryphal link to founding president James Manning suggests the eager- ness of the bearers of Brown University traditions to assume a past as distinguished as those of its potential peer institutions. While no doubt unintentional, by enhancing this story over the years Brown was able to see a brighter image of itself in this burnished tradition. While the English origin of Harvard’s turned three-square chair and the English antecedents of the joined wainscot chair Yale acquired in 1841 (Fig. 5) are tacit reminders

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Fig. 5 Wainscot chair, Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of John E. Bray

of the ceremonial chairs used at Oxford and Cambridge, the presence of a Spanish leather chair was not necessarily incongruous in the maritime colony of Rhode Island. The seaport towns of Narragansett Bay were flush with goods imported from around the world, and Rhode Island’s fleet of privateers — raiders licensed by the colonial government to prey on merchant ships of nations at war with Great Britain — was a constant source of exotic bounty. Colonial Rhode Island was a cosmopolitan place, and the Spanish chair presented to Governor Stephen Hopkins found a welcome place in his front hallway and in the houses of his descendants for much of a century before his grand-nephew donated it to Brown. The recent discovery of the donor’s 1848 letter in the University Archives has not dimmed the enthusiasm at Brown for this most venerated relic of the university. When the president presides at Commencement exercises the pageantry of university tradition is sustained regardless of its documented history, to the enjoyment of parents and alumni. Iconoclasts who are unimpressed with the solemnity of Brown’s traditions are delighted to think of the president conducting the rituals of her office while seated upon pirate loot. Students of anthropology or material culture are fascinated by the evolving meanings the university has attached to the chair over the years. On the occasion of its semi- quincentennial anniversary Brown’s ceremonial chair continues to serve as the university’s greatest icon. Robert P. Emlen University Curator and Senior Lecturer in American Studies Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

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