BOSTON, POSSIBLY CARVED BY THOMAS WIGHTMAN, 1800-1810

The pedestal of this table relates to the carving on the bed posts of a bedstead in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, pictured in Margaret Burke Cloonie, Anne Farnam and Robert F. Trent's Furniture at the Essex Institute (Salem, MA, 1980) p. 33. The carving is also closely related to that on bedposts of a Boston-made bed, illustrated in The New Fine Points of Furniture (Sack, 1993), p. 87. Thomas Wightman has recently been identified by Robert Mussey as the artist who carved much of the furniture from the Boston shop of John and Thomas Seymour. There is additional evidence that suggests that Wightman may have carved for other prominent Boston shops, including that of Isaac Vose, where Thomas Seymour worked as shop foreman after his own shop closed about 1817.