SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, 1760-1790

A masterful survival of New England regionalism, this high chest-of-drawers exhibits the local preferences of Salem cabinetmakers working in the second half of the eighteenth century. While the overall form and fan-carved drawers are seen with relative frequency, the central ball-topped finial, pinwheel “rosettes” in the inner termini of the bonnet molding, repeated pinwheels on two closely spaced rosettes on the skirt, central diamond-shaped cut-out in the skirt and angular transitioning-to-curvilinear cabriole legs indicate not only a Salem, Massachusetts origin but possibly an attribution to a specific shop. These key decorative elements are also present on at least three other examples; those in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New England Historic Genealogical Society and a third that sold at auction in 2008 (The Art Institute of Chicago, acc. no. 1984.714; Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture (Boston, 1984), p. 28, fig. I-27; Sotheby’s, New York, Property from the Estate of J. Welles Henderson, 18 January 2008, lot 252). Variations on this design include high chests with fan-carving with scalloped profiles, smaller, widely spaced pinwheel carved lobes in the skirt and pad feet that most likely indicate the work of competing shops. With its original brasses and elongated talons on the ball-and-claw feet, this chest survives in remarkable condition. It has descended in the same family for at least several generations and may have been part of the collection of Mary Edith Powel (1846-1931), a family ancestor of the current owner who lived in Newport, Rhode Island and is known to have collected American antiques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.