VERY FINE AND RARE QUEEN ANNE CARVED CHERRYWOOD DRESSING TABLE, WETHERSFIELD, CONNECTICUT, CIRCA 1760

Northeast Auctions, Manchester, New Hampshire, Annual Summer Americana Auction, August 7, 2011, lot 1269.

Antiques and the Arts Weekly, September 9, 2011, p. 13;

R. Scudder Smith, "Northeast Auctions Conducts Its Annual Summer Americana Auction," Maine Antique Digest, September 2011, p. 14;

With its elegant design, fine craftsmanship and graceful proportions, this dressing table reflects the perfection attained by cabinetmakers working in the Wethersfield style. Made of cherrywood and birch, it survives with its original red wash and cast-brass hardware. The shell is typical of those found on Wethersfield style high chests and dressing tables produced throughout Hartford County in the second-half of the eighteenth century. It contains fifteen rays that converge on an uncarved semicircle, with an escutcheon above the shell and a recess below. Though most Wethersfield dressing tables with cabriole legs were made with knee returns, the lack of nail holes and shadow lines on this example suggest it may have been made without them, though they could have been lost early in its history.

A related high chest of drawers made circa 1762 and owned by Elizabeth Hanmer (1733-1814) and Timothy Francis (1732-1807) of Wethersfield is in the collection of the Captain James Francis House in Wethersfield.¹ It similarly displays a lower case with a long drawer over short drawers, carved shell above a recess that is narrower than the shell, a cyma-shaped apron centering small pendant semi-circles, and slender cabriole legs ending in bowl-shaped pad feet on a truncated cone supporting pad. It exhibits ogee-shaped canted knee returns applied under the apron, with one missing. It retains its original brasses which are identical in pattern to those on this dressing table.

¹ See Thomas Kugelman and Alice K. Kugelman with Robert Lionetti. Connecticut Valley Furniture: Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800. Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society Museum, 2005, cat. no. 22, p. 63.