The horn of plenty may never have seemed as bounteous as it did to the generation of Americans that came of age in the prosperous 1850s. The tastemakers of the period favored ostentatious furnishings that symbolized their success, such as the exquisite chair opposite, made in about 1855 by John Henry Belter, New York’s leading cabinetmaker of his day. The intricately carved back of the chair—aswarm with grapevines and framed by sinuous cornucopias—instilled in its sitters the agreeable sensation that the harvest was in, the granaries full, and the wine cellar well stocked.

Belter started life with the given name Johann Heinrich in Germany, where he was born in 1804. As an apprentice in Württemberg, he learned both cabinetmaking and carving. In 1833 he emigrated to the United States. His passport described him as five feet seven inches tall, with brown hair and gray eyes and “incomplete” teeth. In 1839, having Anglicized his name to John Henry Belter, he became an American citizen. Five years later he opened a shop on Chatham Street, then New York’s fashionable cabinetmaking center.

Belter’s entry into the highly competitive New York furniture business coincided with the rise of rococo revival, one of the many historical styles that were recycled throughout the nineteenth century in a seemingly endless wave of nostalgia for earlier eras. Belter arrived on the scene too late for the Greek and Egyptian updates, but his timing—and his talents—were ideal for the new version of rococo, known in its day as “Antique French” and the pre-eminent style in mid-century America.

The rococo-revival style derived its sinuous contours and swirling arrangements of scrolls from the designs of the Louis XV period. Belter’s chair reveals the influence of this style in the curvature of its front seat rail, cabriole legs, and scroll feet. But he contributed his own brand of design wizardry in the intricate elaboration of natural forms, sometimes delicately traced, sometimes almost sensuous in their three-dimensionality, and in so doing created a uniquely American interpretation of an international style.

This type of chair, easily recognized by its relatively low seat and correspondingly high back, is often designated as a “slipper chair”—that is, a chair with short legs used in the bedroom. “But I’ve never seen this form described as a slipper chair in any period reference,” says Ulysses Dietz, curator of decorative arts at the Newark Museum, in Newark, New Jersey. He has seen inventories, however, that refer to it as a “fancy chair” or “reception chair.” Such chairs were intentionally made as virtuoso works and used singly or paired in parlors as conversation pieces. “They were to be perched on, rather than sat in,” Dietz adds. In any case, the pierced and carved chair back is an outstanding example of both style and craft and “an extraordinary tour de force,” to quote Marshall B. Davidson and Elizabeth Stillinger, coauthors of The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art