Maine Antique Digest, December 2016

24-C Maine Antique Digest, December 2016

FEATURE -

24-C

descended through two more generations of Appletons

until it was sent to New York for sale. It is a shame that

the galleries are not spacious enough to show at least one

door of the bookcases open.

Aseparategallery is filledwith theearliest knownRhode

Island furniture—none of it made in Newport. Dennis

Carr, the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American

Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston (MFA), an early member of the Kane team,

wrote the first chapter in the catalog on early furniture

making in the Narragansett Bay region and gave the first

talk at the symposium. He spoke about “Innovation and

Diversity in Early Rhode Island Furniture, 1636-1740,”

a subject that he has been investigating since 2002,

when he began his graduate work at Yale. Very little

17th-century Rhode Island furniture survives; fewer than

50 pieces of furniture made before 1700 are recorded in

the RIFA. Native American raids destroyed towns, and

time took its toll. A wainscot chair and turned chairs are

similar to Massachusetts and Connecticut examples. A

chest and chair have Dutch influence; craftsmen migrated

from culturally Dutch areas of New York, New Jersey,

and Long Island. The French were also among the early

settlers in Rhode Island. Early chairs, tables, and couches

have distinctive Rhode Island turnings similar to those

on stair balusters, once seen never forgotten.

Most memorable of the early furniture is a walnut-

veneered fall-front desk, probably made in Swansea,

Massachusetts (now Warren, Rhode Island), 1700-

30. It turned up at Skinner in August 2013 and is now

at the MFA. It is one of only three fall-front desks of

this rare form known: one dated 1707 made by David

Evans in Philadelphia is at Colonial Williamsburg;

another with elaborate vine-and-berry inlay descended

in the Brinckerhoff family in New York and is now at the

Museum of the City of New York. The one in the Rhode

Island exhibition has chestnut as its secondary wood and

50 interior drawers and 25 secret compartments in the

upper case for storing account books, papers, and writing

implements. Made for a member of the merchant class,

it appears in the 1738 inventory of James Child and

descended directly in the family until sold at Skinner.

It makes use of veneering patterns characteristic of

Rhode Island furniture. Now a small town, Warren was

a busy port in the 18th century, a center of shipbuilding

and rising fortunes that supported cabinetmakers. A

faint inscription may be the name of the maker Thomas

Easterbrook, a joiner in Warren.

Carr also discussed a group of early 18th-century

veneered high chests and slant-lid desks made in the

Providence area, all with a distinctive Rhode Island

veneer pattern: two panels of crossbanded veneers flank

a single panel of burled veneer on drawer fronts. Once

thought to have been made in Boston or New York,

these pieces are now assigned to Providence and the

Narragansett Bay region.

The exhibition and catalog introduce furniture made in

Bristol, Coventry, and Kingston, some signed by makers.

But most memorable is the chorus line of five Newport

bureau tables, each one signed by a different craftsman.

Their signatures are reproduced on the wall at the exhibit.

Each is carved with shells that are slightly different,

and each has different construction. The one signed

by Edmund Townsend in 1764 is the earliest of the

60 or so known. It is made of blond mahogany,

and its recessed cupboard has a tombstone door.

(Only about half of the 60 have doors with concave

blocking and carved shells.) This one has an unusual

top drawer; it is hinged and pulls forward to provide

a writing surface, and at the back are small drawers

for writing materials. The carved shells have bars

below the central element and flattened ends to the

inner C-scrolls. Its first owner was John Deshon, a

Huguenot who developed West Indian trade out of

New London, Connecticut.

The bureau table signed by James Goddard Jr., a

nephew of John Goddard who trained with Edmund

Townsend, has carved shells much like his master’s,

but his table lacks the bar below the central element.

Like the others in the exhibit, its central shell was

carved from the solid drawer front and is flanked by

applied shells. James Goddard Jr. made this bureau

for Ruth and Samuel Whitehorne, who were married

in Newport’s Trinity Church in 1771. Ruth was the

daughter of merchant George Gibbs, and the bureau

table descended to their granddaughter. It was sold

to a collector at the sale of the collection of Mr. and

Mrs. Adolph Meyer at Sotheby’s in 1996.

The kneehole bureau by Thomas Townsend,

son of Job Townsend, circa 1765, is signed on the

underside of a drawer divider, which Kane suggests

may mean he was not yet a master but was working

for his father. Its shells are like his brother Edmund’s

but with slight differences: there is no bar under the

shell’s central element, and the ridge around the

inner shell is not tucked in as neatly as his brother’s.

The joinery is markedly different; Thomas made

a full-depth sub-top dovetailed into the case sides,

and the mahogany top is joined to the top with a

dovetail keyway. It sold at Christie’s in 1978 and is

now at the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S.

Department of State.

The only known piece of furniture signed by

Jonathan Townsend, son of Christopher and brother

of John Townsend, is the bureau that sold at Christie’s

in January 2013. Jonathan had a brief career, dying of

smallpox on Long Island in 1772. Math calculations and

“1767” in pencil are on the bottom of the top long drawer

and suggest that he made it when he was just 22 years

old. Jonathan’s shells are particularly fine; their centers

feature delicately carved petals.

Daniel Goddard’s kneehole bureau is different from

the others. On the back of the shell-carved drawers

is written “Daniel Goddard His Draugh” [drawer],

suggesting that he made the drawer. Did he carve the

shells and make the rest of the piece? It is likely he did.

Daniel was John Goddard’s eldest son. He would have

finished his apprenticeship in 1768. In 1782 he joined

a privateering vessel in New York, “an act for which he

was disowned by the Society of Friends.... In 1784 he

received a land grant in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and

by 1786 he is listed as a cabinetmaker there, along with

his brothers Job and Henry, a move perhaps prompted

by the migration to Nova Scotia of wealthy Newport

Loyalists during the American Revolution.” Patricia

Kane writes in the catalog that his bureau could have

been made in Newport between 1780 and 1784 or it

could have been made in Nova Scotia. Its differences are

a latticework background around the shells, stop-fluted

quarter-columns on the case, gadrooning on the base, and

leaf carving on the feet. Its top is attached in a way not

frequently found in Rhode Island. Found in Canada in

the 1960s, this kneehole bureau was sold by Israel Sack

to the Dietrich American Foundation, and it is often on

view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The fact that

we now believe Daniel Goddard and his brothers made

furniture in Nova Scotia may send ambitious pickers

north.

The exhibition and catalog do not ignore the

upholstery trade. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

(Met) lent its most important example of 18th-century

upholstery, the Newport easy chair that is inscribed on

its crest “Made by Caleb / Gardner Jun

Newport May

23 / 1758,” documenting the name of the upholsterer

and where and when the flame stitch needlework was

put on and perhaps when the embroidered fanciful back

panel was added. It is believed that the flame stitch is the

work of professional embroiderers and may have been

imported from London, but the back panel landscape

is by an amateur and related to a group of embroidered

Speakers at

the symposium

(from left): Philip

Zimmerman, Dennis

Carr, Jennifer N.

Johnson, Patricia E.

Kane, Nancy Goyne

Evans, and Gary R.

Sullivan.

The slant-lid desk (right) on loan fromWinterthur was exhibited

by Henry Francis du Pont at the Girl Scouts Loan Exhibition in

1929 as early New England veneered furniture. Later scholars

have called it Rhode Island. It has chestnut as a secondary wood.

The two framed veneered panels are divided by a central vertical

strip, similar to that on the high chest that has a history in the

Providence area and to a slant-lid desk (left) in the Garvan

collection at Yale University. Here it is shown with veneered

Rhode Island furniture. A similar desk on loan from the Museum

of Fine Arts, Houston that was first attributed to Boston has a

similar distinctive pattern and is now thought to be Rhode Island.

The inventories of Rhode Island cabinetmakers of this period list

large amounts of black walnut and tools for veneering.

The highly figured maple desk in the center has the signature

of Abraham Tourtellot of Gloucester, Rhode Island, on the side

and bottom of one of the interior drawers in the desk section.

Tourtellot was a joiner working in Providence, then Smithfield

and later Gloucester. The desk is the only known object

associated with him. Of French extraction, Tourtellot became a

large landowner in Gloucester and is referred to as a gentleman

or “Esq.” in town records. He was elected to serve as a deputy

to the Rhode Island General Assembly. In 1740 he is recorded

as purchasing a desk from Providence joiner Benjamin Hunt. It

is possible that this desk is the work of Hunt, an accomplished

joiner.

The clock by William Claggett of Newport in a veneered case

with a sarcophagus hood is the earliest clock in the exhibition.

This maple high chest of drawers, probably Coventry,

Rhode Island, is signed “AS 1749” and attributed to Amos

Stafford Jr. (b. 1726). Photo courtesy Skinner, Inc.

This fall-front desk, probably Swansea, Massachusetts

(later Warren, Rhode Island), 1700-30, is walnut and

walnut veneer, with pine, chestnut, and maple secondary

woods. It came to light at Skinner in August 2013 and is

now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is one of only

three known examples of this rare form known as a scrutoir

in Colonial America, and the only one from New England.

It descended in the Child family and has a faint inscription

“Thomas Easterbrook,” who may have been the Warren,

Boston.