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Lot Essay
This table is an exceptionally rare survival of Queen Anne tea tables made in eighteenth-century Connecticut. With its slender and fluid cabriole legs, terminating in tall carved 'Spanish' or paintbrush feet, this table imparts an unusual degree of lightness. The rare embellishments of candle slides are flourishes of expert craftsmanship that places this example in a class with few others. Elegant in both form and function, this table is a skillfully crafted object central to the properly appointed parlors of the well-to-do in colonial Suffield, Connecticut.
The growth of tea drinking as a social custom among the colonial elite occasioned the production of fine furniture, especially in urban centers of wealth and commerce. The tea table was the focal point of the tea ceremony and its construction and design were informed by its exotic ties to the Far East. The rectangular tops and cabriole legs were features of tables made in China since the fifteenth-century. These design elements were transferred to England in the early eighteenth-century and brought into fashion in the colonies during the Queen Anne period. Like the table in the present lot, the most fashionable form in New England was the rectangular top tea table with fixed legs (see Kirk, American Furniture in the British Tradition (New York, 1982), pp. 325-333). This table was meant to stand as the sculptural centerpiece of the lavish tea service without tablecloth or covering.
The growth of tea drinking as a social custom among the colonial elite occasioned the production of fine furniture, especially in urban centers of wealth and commerce. The tea table was the focal point of the tea ceremony and its construction and design were informed by its exotic ties to the Far East. The rectangular tops and cabriole legs were features of tables made in China since the fifteenth-century. These design elements were transferred to England in the early eighteenth-century and brought into fashion in the colonies during the Queen Anne period. Like the table in the present lot, the most fashionable form in New England was the rectangular top tea table with fixed legs (see Kirk, American Furniture in the British Tradition (New York, 1982), pp. 325-333). This table was meant to stand as the sculptural centerpiece of the lavish tea service without tablecloth or covering.