Parson Turrell's Legacy
Date1894
Artist
Howard Pyle
(American illustrator, 1853–1911)
Illustration CitationThe Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1894)
MediumBlack and white oil on illustration board
Dimensions11 x 8 1/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm)
frame: 12 1/4 × 16 in. (31.1 × 40.6 cm)
frame: 12 1/4 × 16 in. (31.1 × 40.6 cm)
Credit LineGift of Willard S. Morse, 1923
Object number1923-149
On View
Not on viewClassificationsPAINTING
Label TextPyle depicts the chair that Holmes describes as the subject of a parson’s humorously complicated 18th-century bequest to Harvard College: “Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge,
One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings,
But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand,
Fit for the worthies of the land“
