Part of a ten-piece drawing room suite now scattered among various museums, this sofa was made especially for Belmead, a Gothic Revival residence belonging to wealthy plantation owner Philip St. George Cocke in Powhatan County, Virginia. In 1848, Cocke and his architect, Andrew Jackson Davis, traveled to New York to place an order with Burns and Trainque, who had made furniture to Davis’s specifications for fashionable “pointed style” mansions that were springing up along the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. Details of the BMA’s sofa, such as the arched panels flanking the back, echo Gothic Revival motifs that appear in the architectural details of Belmead. The sofa was reupholstered using fragmentary evidence of the original damask found along tack lines in the wood frame.