Object Details
Object Essay
This small slab table is unusual because of its drawers, which make it appear a hybrid of dressing table and slab table.A Philadelphia slab table at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has one long drawer (Hipkiss, pl. 52).1 Since alcohol would not harm the marble top, it could have functioned as a side table in a dining room, the drawers holding serving implements, or in a parlor or bedroom as a mixing table, the drawers used for general storage.
Its heavily webbed ball and claw feet are reminiscent of those seen on Queen Anne-style balloon-seat chairs and on a small tea table at Winterthur. Its format, with scrolled molded valances applied to the lower edges of the rails, is firmly within this same Queen Anne style.Downs 1952, pls. 106 and 367.2 The brasses on the drawers of the table are not original.
For reasons that are not clear, an unusual white pine sub-top was included under the marble. The sub-top may have been considered a better bearing surface for the top than just the rails and medial member or may have been an additional dust seal for the drawers.
This table clearly was made to support a marble top, as there are no indications of a finished wood top ever having been present, and there are compression marks on the top ends of the legs from a long history of supporting a stone top. If this marble top is not original, it is possible that the incurved corner treatment, with thumb-molded edge, is an alteration that accompanied its addition. The ends of the strips of mahogany molding under the top have been carved in at their miter joints under these corners to correspond with the plan of this marble. The top surface of the marble shows little sign of use and the underside is smoothly dressed. The upper face of the sub-top is not scratched and dented by the rough underside of a previous slab. There are holes from tacks on the upper surface of the sub-top and rails suggesting that at some point after the manufacture of the table a fabric cover was applied. There are no corresponding marks from these tacks in the undersurface of the current marble.
A small patch is let into the lower rail under the divider between the drawers, which is tenoned into the upper and lower front rails. The patch seems to be made from the same piece of wood as the rail itself, suggesting that an accident occurred while the mortise for the divider’s tenon was being chopped into the rail, and the resulting breakout was repaired from the same stock used for the rail during the manufacture of the table. Even cabinetmakers as careful as those who made this table were not perfect, but their remedy made their error scarcely detectable.
Alan T. Miller
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.