Description:
Small dressing table in white pine and maple covered with a dark red stain. The dressing table has a scalloped top, over a single drawer made of thick parts with protruding rear dovetails and cut nails, and is supported by straight, tapered legs with molded edges. The scallop top concept, which begain in Wethersfield, Connecticut in the 1750s, migrated up the Connecticut River Valley to the Northampton-Hatfield-Deerfield region of western Massachusetts, where other variants in this "style" were made into the first years of the nineteenth century. The dressing table was owned by Charles Porter Phelps (1772-1857) of Hadley; in October 1988, it was found in the southwest chamber of the Phelps-Sessions House. The table was probably originally owned across the road in the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House by Charles Phelps, Sr. and Elizabeth Porter Phelps, who remodelled parts of their house in 1799. The tri-part scalloped shape of the top is very reminiscent of the cherry dressing table (62.038) that descended in the Hastings-Billings families. The cut nails date its manufacture much later than the table's appearance; its form dates from the 1760's, but cut nails place the table in the 1790s at the earliest. The earliest dated piece of western Massachusetts furniture with cut nails is a serpentine chest by Erastus Grant of Westfield, 1799. The table may have been made by an older craftsman such as Samuel Gaylord, Jr. (1742-1816), who is known to have worked for the Phelps family.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+88.096 |
