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Lot Essay
Illustrating Joseph K. Ott's particular interest in furniture that could be tied to an individual, either maker or owner, this desk-on-frame bears a printed sketch that indicates it stood in the house of Captain Benoni Cooke (1781-1865) of Providence. In 1807, Cooke married Amey Brown (1784-1822), whose father Captain Isaac Brown (1751-1793) was a first cousin of Providence's famous merchant Brown brothers. The desk may have been made soon after their wedding or perhaps inherited from an earlier generation. Cooke's house, which still stands today at 110 South Main Street (fig. 1), was a large three-story brick mansion designed by architect John Holden Greene in 1828. As depicted in the sketch affixed to this desk, the house stood two doors down from that previously built by one of the merchant brothers, Joseph Brown (1733-1785) (Harriet Ruth (Waters) Cooke, The Driver Family, vol. 2 (New York, 1889), p. 344; Osmund R. Overby, "The Benoni Cooke House, HABS no. RI-213," Historic American Buildings Survey (1962), available at https://www.historicmapworks.com/Buildings/index.php?state=RI&city=Provi dence&id=28211).
Comprising a removable box atop a stand with chestnut secondary woods, the desk offered here is a Rhode Island version of a form probably made throughout New England. At least two others display closely related box sections that include a compartment of three drawers above the writing surface. One of these descended in the Townsend and Sheffield families of Newport is now in the collection of the Newport Restoration Foundation and another attributed to Massachusetts is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (The Rhode Island Furniture Archive at the Yale University Art Gallery, RIF4408; Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, 1988), pp. 319-320, cat. 167).
Comprising a removable box atop a stand with chestnut secondary woods, the desk offered here is a Rhode Island version of a form probably made throughout New England. At least two others display closely related box sections that include a compartment of three drawers above the writing surface. One of these descended in the Townsend and Sheffield families of Newport is now in the collection of the Newport Restoration Foundation and another attributed to Massachusetts is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery (The Rhode Island Furniture Archive at the Yale University Art Gallery, RIF4408; Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, 1988), pp. 319-320, cat. 167).