Figures 104 and 105. Card Tables. Wealth, skilled competitors, population growth, and knowledge of fashion were parts of a mixture of ingredients in Philadelphia that produced imaginative variety in furniture design. A straight frame with nonconforming top supported by tapered Marlborough legs provides a contrasting form in Figure 105. Top corners are rounded, like those […]
Category: Middle Atlantic and Southern Colonies
Figure 73
Figure 73. Settee. This settee’s claw-and-ball feet relate to other Philadelphia seating furniture. Carved shells in high relief on a shaped skirt are also familiar. Carving on the front rail at the juncture of legs and seat was shown on a side chair (Fig. 62). Settees were not a common form of seating furniture […]
Philadelphia
Figure 38. Bed. The only stylish feature of this high-post bedstead is fluted decoration on the footposts. Though Philadelphians were generally more style conscious than New Yorkers, there was a market for Queen Anne forms and decoration in Philadelphia throughout the Chippendale period. Poplar was the common wood for bedsteads. In 1777, George Haughton, a […]
Figures 26 and 27
Candlesiands. Shallow knee carving—here in the form of fleur-de-lis, V-shaped lambrequin, and acanthus leaf—combined with a turned urn and Doric or Tuscan columnar shaft relate Figure 26 to other New York screens, stands, and tables. A heavy disc separating an urn or baluster shape from the base of the shaft is frequently seen on New […]
Plate IV
closely related to Figure 34, but in neither example is the carving in the high relief that is associated with tilt-top tables made in Philadelphia (Figs. 11518). According to Joseph Downs, this table was found in Albany. In the advertisement of the sale of household furniture noted above, "A Sett of fine Tea Table China" […]
Figures 15,16, and 17
Plate 1. Bed. In colonial America, the term bedstead meant the frame, headboard, and posts. Bed furniture referred to matched hangings, as in this set of English indigo resist-dyed cotton. The bed has typical New York cabriole legs with leaf-carved knees and square claw-and-ball feet. Other New York examples have stop fluting (Figs. 7,17). The […]
Figures 5 and 6. Side Chairs. The splat design of these chairs (interlaced elements centering on a diamond motif) was frequently used in New York, but variations of it occur on chairs from other regions
Handsome but rigidly controlled and shallow carving is a distinctive New York feature (Fig. 5a). The rear feet of Figure 5 (Fig. 5c) and the four-square claw-and-ball feet of Figure 6 are also familiar New York features. But the front feet of Figure 5 and the so-called stump rear legs of Figure 6 are more […]
New York
Middle Atlantic and Southern Colonies In 1835, before the handcraft system of production in America had been replaced by modern industrial techniques, Alexis de Tocqueville characterized the utilitarian spirit in which Americans cultivated the arts: "They habitually put use before beauty, and they want beauty itself to be useful."1 Almost seventy years earlier, the colonial […]