AMERICAN OR ENGLISH, LATE 19TH CENTURY

By the late nineteenth century, American furniture designers were influenced by both the English reform movement and the precepts of Charles Eastlake and began to use oak more frequently in their designs. This desk shares similar structural and decorative elements, such as the spindle balustrade and gothic-style brass, with a desk from Boston, circa 1895, labeled PAINE'S FURNITURE COMPANY, illustrated in Donald C. Peirce, Art and Enterprise: American Decorative Art 1875-1917: The Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection (New York, 1999), p. 270.