Culture: | American
| Title: | card table
| Date Made: | 1795-1810
| Type: | Furniture
| Materials: | wood: mahogany, mahogany veneer, white pine, white oak; paint, glass, gilding
| Place Made: | United States; Maryland; Baltimore
| Measurements: | overall: 29 3/8 x 35 3/8 x 17 1/4 in.; 74.5998 x 89.8398 x 43.815 cm
| Narrative Inscription: | typed label inside proper right apron: "The City Library Association, Springfield/Museum of Fine Arts/Card table/(glass inlays)/American/Loaned by/Mrs. J. Philip Walker/14.42.F2"
| Accession Number: | HD 85.020
| Credit Line: | Gift of Mrs. J. Philip Walker
| Museum Collection: | Historic Deerfield
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Description: Card table with a kidney-shaped front highlighted by stringing with Greek key corners and inset with three eglomise panels painted in gold on a blue background with Classical figures - the large center panel has a reclining woman, the smaller right panel has a dancing woman, and the left has other figures in Classical dress. The table has four square tapered legs with stringing and inlaid cuffs. Eglomise panels occured on mirror and glazed doors in Boston and New York, while in Baltimore, they were inlaid in tables and case pieces. George Alfred Cluett (1873-1955), of Troy, New York, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, collected American furniture from around 1901, shortly after he and Edith Tucker were married, through the mid-1920s. Cluett was prominent among early collectors. For the first museum exhibition of American furniture, The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, Cluett loaned 22 objects. Cluett, whose family business became Arrow Shirts, finished collecting before Henry Francis DuPont began to amass objects for what became the core of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The Cluett family donated most of its collection to Historic Deerfield beginning in 1960, with its last gifts given in 2003. Cluett’s keen connoisseurship, focused on Classical objects (contemporary to his grandparents’ lives) is notable as he collected before the publication of the first seminal reference books on American antiques. Moreover, the early twentieth-century collectors focused on the so-called Pilgrim Century, which predates the Classical era by over one hundred years. Cluett was particularly intrigued by the work of craftsmen including Seymour, McIntire, Phyfe, and Lannuier. Cluett’s desire for privacy, and reverence for times past has long obscured his creative connoisseurship and legacy as one of the earliest and influential collectors of American furniture.
Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+85.020 |