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Lot Essay
With its sophisticated design, refined carving and impressive condition, the lot offered here is an outstanding survival of high-style furniture from mid-eighteenth century Boston. Card tables with projecting circular front corners, or turrets, derived from English imports and were particularly favored in Massachusetts from 1730 to 1770. This table is remarkable for its exquisitely articulated ball-and-claw feet with delicate and attenuated claws.
As outlined in the Sack volume (see Literature, above), this table was purchased in the 1930s from Isabella Thomas Whitman (b. 1848) and may have originally been made for one of her ancestors in the Warren-Sever or Thomas families. These include her great great grandmother, Sarah (Warren) Sever (1730-1797), whose sister-in-law, Mercy (Otis) Warren, owned a related turret-top table with original needlework covering possibly wrought by Mercy herself (see Jonathan Fairbanks et al., Paul Revere's Boston: 1735-1818 (Boston, 1975), p. 83, no. 95).
As outlined in the Sack volume (see Literature, above), this table was purchased in the 1930s from Isabella Thomas Whitman (b. 1848) and may have originally been made for one of her ancestors in the Warren-Sever or Thomas families. These include her great great grandmother, Sarah (Warren) Sever (1730-1797), whose sister-in-law, Mercy (Otis) Warren, owned a related turret-top table with original needlework covering possibly wrought by Mercy herself (see Jonathan Fairbanks et al., Paul Revere's Boston: 1735-1818 (Boston, 1975), p. 83, no. 95).