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Lot Essay
Unique to Long Island and originating in Oyster Bay, the double-panelled blanket chest with ball and stretcher feet is reminiscent of Dutch kasten. Not found in other areas of New York with Dutch concentration, it is believed these blanket chests were produced by English Quakers who mingled with Long Island Dutch settlers more than other English settlers. This hypothesis implies that the form had both Dutch and rural English antecedents.
While it is believed this chest form originated in a single Oyster Bay shop, successive generations of craftsmen developed slight variations which updated the chest over a period of nearly one hundred years. Emphasizing a more horizontal form than the earlier more vertical baroque models, this blanket chest's double fielded-panels are reminiscent of the panels on a cupboard and the only other known double fielded-panelled blanket chest both of which came from the Lewis Samuel Hewlett homestead in North Hempstead, Long Island. Sharing not only the double fielded-panels but the single beaded molding surrounding them, these objects may have been produced by a carpenter-joiner accustomed to fashioning architectural woodwork.
For a further discussion on the evolution of the double-panelled blanket chest see Failey, Long Island is My Nation The Decorative Arts & Craftsmen 1640-1830 (Cold Spring Harbor, 1998), pp. 104-107 and for the cupboard with double fielded-panels see p. 9-26.
While it is believed this chest form originated in a single Oyster Bay shop, successive generations of craftsmen developed slight variations which updated the chest over a period of nearly one hundred years. Emphasizing a more horizontal form than the earlier more vertical baroque models, this blanket chest's double fielded-panels are reminiscent of the panels on a cupboard and the only other known double fielded-panelled blanket chest both of which came from the Lewis Samuel Hewlett homestead in North Hempstead, Long Island. Sharing not only the double fielded-panels but the single beaded molding surrounding them, these objects may have been produced by a carpenter-joiner accustomed to fashioning architectural woodwork.
For a further discussion on the evolution of the double-panelled blanket chest see Failey, Long Island is My Nation The Decorative Arts & Craftsmen 1640-1830 (Cold Spring Harbor, 1998), pp. 104-107 and for the cupboard with double fielded-panels see p. 9-26.