Soon after India became a British colony in the mid-eighteenth century, Indian craftsmen began making furniture to contemporary British designs using local materials and decorative motifs. This armchair, made of hardwood veneered with engraved ivory, has turned front legs, scrolling armrests, saber-shaped rear legs, and a cane seat in the style of the late eighteenth-century English furniture designer Thomas Sheraton. The typically Indian decoration includes the floral engraving, the brass finials along the top of the backrest, and the brass bells hanging from the arm- and backrests. Although such furniture was first commissioned by the British living in India, by the early nineteenth century much of the work that was produced was being bought by wealthy Indians. Vishakhapatnam, a city on the eastern coast of India with a long tradition of ivory work, became the center of the manufacture of ivory-veneered Anglo-Indian furniture. Julia H. M. Smith, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 60.