Very Fine and Rare Pilgrim Century Red-Painted Carved Oak and Yellow Pine Document Box, attributed to John Moore I, Windsor, Connecticut, circa 1685

Lot Closed

January 21, 03:59 PM GMT

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property from the Collection of a Founding Family of Connecticut

Very Fine and Rare Pilgrim Century Red-Painted Carved Oak and Yellow Pine Document Box

attributed to John Moore I, Windsor

Connecticut

circa 1685

appears to retain original painted surface on sides and appears to retain its original lock, the number 300 is painted on the inside. Cleats replaced.

Height 10 in. by Width 29 3/8 in. by Depth 16 3/4 in.

Collection of Henry Wood Erving (1851-1941), Hartford, Connecticut;
Property owned by Descendants of Henry Wood Erving;
Sotheby’s, New York, Important Americana including Property Approved for Deacession by the Board of Trustees of Historic Deerfield, January 21, 2007, lot 356.

Wallace Nutting, Furniture of the Pilgrim Century: 1620-1720, (Framingham, MA: Old America Company, 1924), p.171, no. 139;
Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1954), no. 133.

Early Windsor, Connecticut furniture scholarship has undergone a significant renaissance with the detailed research of Joshua Lane and Donald White. They have attributed similar boxes to the “Foliated Vine Group” and John Moore (1614-1677) as the originator of this design. A very closely related box, in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been attributed to John Moore I by Lane and White. Moore had however a number of apprentices including Thomas Bissell (1628-1689), Nathaniel Bissell (1640-1713), his two sons John Jr. (1645-1718) and Andrew (1649-1719), and Thomas Barber Sr. and it is plausible that this box may have been crafted by one of these men as well.

A distinctive construction element of boxes from this shop is a squared notch cut in the proper left upper inside corner (see detail). Lane and White clearly describe that the box’s shallow relief carving was laid out by “dividing a rectangle into four sections with three vertical scribe lines. Working outward from a roughly wedge-shaped vertical stem aligned on the centerline and alternating from side to side as the pattern progressed, the craftsman used gouge cuts of varying sizes to form the individual leaves and petals of the foliate carving. This method enabled him to replicate any unintentional variation in reverse on the corresponding quadrant, thereby maintaining the pattern’s overall symmetry.”

This box is remarkable for not only its immense size but also the preservation of its apparent original red pigment wash on its sides. For additional information on the Moore shop tradition see Joshua W. Lane and Donald P. White III, The Woodworkers of Windsor: A Connecticut Community of Craftsmen and Their World, 1635-1715, (Deerfield, MA: Historic Deerfield, Inc., 2003), pp. 10-19 and Joshua W. Lane and Donald P. White III, “Fashioning Furniture and Framing Community: Woodworkers and the Rise of a Connecticut River Valley Town”, ed Luke Beckerdite, American Furniture, (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2005), pp. 146-238 (specifically pp. 178-191).