A tale of two sofas

Editorial Staff Art

They were big, brawny, and bold. The near-identical sofas in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA)-once celebrated as rare ex­amples of gilded furniture from the shop of John Henry Belter-were so visually pushy that the former curator of American arts, David Park Curry, dubbed them the “Tarleton Twins.” Today, following several years of research and an extensive conservation cam­paign, …