A William and Mary Red Painted Tuckaway Table, New England, Circa 1720

John S. Walton, Griswold, Connecticut, April 1987;

Vogel Collection no. 474.

A virtually identical table is in the collection of Winterthur Museum (acc. no. 1956.525). This table is also one of approximately eight surviving tuckaway tables where the whole top folds down. The vast majority of tuckaway tables with trestle bases are made with a stationary centerboard and two falling leaves (see lot 955). While their ingenious convenience suggests many were likely made, the reason for the form’s tremendous scarcity is their inherent fragility. Other examples of single leaf folding tables are at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (acc. no. 26.124), Wadsworth Atheneum (acc. no. 1926.490); Henry Ford Museum, Henry Wood Erving collection; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monmouth County Historical Association; and Shelburne Museum (see Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1965), pp. 109-11, no. 78; Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, (New York: Macmillan, 1928), nos. 939, 941; Robert Bishop, American Furniture 1620-1720, (Dearborne, MI: Edison Institute, 1975), p. 21; Luke Vincent Lockwood, Colonial Furniture in America, (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1926), p. 178-9, no. 688; Irving Whitall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), fig. 99).