Chippendale Carved Blond Mahogany Chest on Chest

Object Details

Object Essay

Chest-on-chests and linen presses with flat tops were popular for storing clothes and textiles among urban and anglicized New Yorkers during the colonial period. The form is closely related to English furniture of the mid-18th century, except for the colonial preferences for retaining cabriole legs with ball and claw feet.^{1_{Miller 1985, 245–58, particularly fig. D5.}} By contrast, most New Englanders and Philadelphians preferred high chests. Still, when considering large case pieces, chest-on-chests are relatively scarce in numbers when compared to the several hundred surviving examples of the New Yorkers’ favorite storage furniture, the kast, a large two-door cupboard derived from rural Dutch models.

The chest-on-chest and the kast vividly illustrate the cultural division of the colony. The government of New York was English from the conquest in 1664 except for a brief period in 1673. New York City, as the seat of the colonial government and a center for trade, immigration, and British military activity in North America, became cosmopolitan, with a strong English presence. In the hinterlands, large landowners and the British colonial government aligned with each other through mutual political necessity. But the small farmer, self-sufficient and largely isolated in western Long Island and along the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys, remained profoundly Dutch. Most commentators during the colonial period remarked on the difference between town and country. This cultural diversity is reflected in cultural preferences as well. City residents ordered the fashionable English chest-on-chest, while inhabitants of the countryside steadfastly built the Dutch kast.

This chest-on-chest has many of the high-style Chippendale characteristics identified with New York City furniture, including broad proportions, mahogany primary wood, a flat cornice, three small drawers on the top tier, chamfered corners ending in lamb’s tongues, and ball and claw feet. A chest-on-chest that descended in the Wynkoop family of New York is virtually identical in appearance.^{2_{Homer Eaton Keyes, “The Editor’s Attic,” Antiques 29 (May 1936), 190.}} Some of these details were established by 1753 when “a good Mahogany Chest of Drawers, with Eagle’s Claw Feet, a Shell on each knee, and fluted Corners, with good Brass Work and Locks” was offered in The New-York Gazette.^{3_{Gottesman 1938, 122.}} As in the case of the Collection’s other New York chest-on-chest, this example has a secretary or desk drawer at the top of the base section. Another chest-on-chest with a secretary drawer from the Fox family also shares the same design, with the addition of a gadrooned molding on the base and multiple cyma moldings on the cornice.^{4_{Hornor 1935, pl. 189.}}

Although it is not signed or labeled, this chest-on-chest does have one idiosyncrasy of construction that may offer a clue to the identity of the cabinetmaker. The bottom drawer has a false rail that is actually part of the drawer front itself, thus giving the drawer an extra inch in depth. The same detail is found in a chest of drawers that descended in the Townsend family of Long Island. But for the difference in forms and the applied ornamentation of a fretwork frieze and a gadrooned molding around the base of the chest of drawers, the two pieces of furniture are virtually identical and must have come from the same shop.^{5_{Flanigan, no. 28.}}

The Collection’s chest-on-chest has a tradition of ownership by the Van Rensselaer family. While of Dutch descent, the Van Rensselaers assimilated quickly with the British because the legality of the family’s vast land holdings around Albany required close association with government officials. Several members of the family built handsome Georgian town and country houses in the two decades before the Revolution, and this case piece would have been appropriate in any of them. 

Gilbert Tapley Vincent and Joseph T. Butler

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.