CARVING ATTRIBUTED TO THE "SPIKE CARVER," PHILADELPHIA, 1760-1780

Superbly rendered and carved out of a rich walnut, this dressing table has a finely executed shell drawer decorated with a central flower-head flanked by long flowing tendrils. The ornament continues below to a shell-carved apron, raised on similarly shell-carved cabriole legs ending in boldly carved ball-and-ball feet. Distinguished by elongated leafy tendrils and gouge cuts that run through the ends of leaf tips and shell lobes, the carving on this dressing table can be attributed to the unidentified carver nicknamed "Spike" by Alan Miller and Luke Beckerdite. According to Miller, this carver's work was very important in Philadelphia through the 1760s and early 1770s. This carver's capable and exuberant carved decoration from this pre-Revolutionary era can be observed on the Lawrence-Palmer high chest and matching dressing table at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Wistar-Sharples desk-and-bookcase at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See Alan Miller, catalogue entry, in Clement E. Conger and A.W. Rollins, Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the US Department of State (New York, 1991), cat. 28; Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 104-105, cat. 84; Morrison H. Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1985), pp. 255-258, 351, cats. 166, 167.