Cabinet on stand

Date1750-1770

MediumBlack walnut and yellow pine.

DimensionsOH: 58 1/4"; OW: 37 3/4"; OD: 19

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1986-112

DescriptionAppearance: Cabinet with two paneled door concealing a bank of 13 small drawers; complex cornice; four cabriole legs with voluted knee blocks and pad feet.

Construction: On the upper case, the top board is nailed to large interior blocks that are nailed and glued to the top edges of the case sides. Half-inch-wide filler strips bring the top board flush with the outer dimensions of the case and provide a flat nailing surface for the cornice. The dustboards are tenoned along the front edge and set into grooves on the rear of the drawer blades and into dadoes on the case sides. Horizontal backboards are nailed into the rabbeted case sides and flush-nailed at the top and bottom. The bottom board is half-blind dovetailed to the case sides. All of the interior drawers are traditionally dovetailed. They have relatively flat bottom panels set into a groove at the front, flush-nailed at the rear, and glued into rabbets along the sides; the latter joint is secured with full-length glue strips. The upper drawers additionally have central front-to-back dividers dadoed in place. The door frames are held together with shouldered mortise-and-tenon joints, and the panels are set into dadoes. In the manner of traditional table construction, the rails are tenoned into the legs and secured with pins. The volutes are flush-glued to the fronts of the rails and the adjacent legs. The molded upper edges of the rails are rabbeted on the interior to receive the upper case.

Materials: Black walnut cornice, sides, doors, drawer fronts, drawer blades, frame rails, legs, and joint pins; yellow pine top, back, bottom, drawer sides, drawer backs, drawer bottoms, drawer stops, kickers, and glue blocks.
Label TextIn the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word "cabinet" had several meanings. A cabinet could be a small private chamber in which confidential consultations were held. That is how Thomas Jefferson interpreted the word when he designed his "cabinet" at Monticello, a room described by a visitor in 1809 as part of the ex-President's "sanctum sanctorum." The same themes of privacy, protection, and value were associated with the furniture term "cabinet," which described several related case forms designed for storage and security. As Samuel Johnson noted in his Dictionary (1755), a cabinet is "a set of boxes or drawers for curiosities; a private box."

Freestanding cabinets differed considerably in size and decoration. The "cabinet" made in England in 1619 for the Prince of Wales was a large, ornate, standing form, while the "Small Cabinet" listed in the Williamsburg estate inventory of Peyton Randolph (d. 1775) and valued at less than £2 was almost certainly a spice box. Cabinet was also used to describe apothecary chests, which were roughly the same size as spice boxes but held medicines, medical instruments, and libations. Often the only clue to the specific type of cabinet listed in an inventory is its location in the house. Regardless of size, any furniture form termed a cabinet was understood to have a number of small drawers set behind lockable doors.

Full-size cabinets were extremely popular among the elite in the British Isles during much of the seventeenth century. Many examples in the wealthiest households were actually lacquered Asian carcasses placed on carved and gilded European stands. In time, however, European artisans began to make both stained wood and "japanned" cabinets. Despite the popularity of the cabinet on stand in Britain, Americans never embraced the form enthusiastically. A few southern variations are known, among them a cherry and yellow pine cabinet on chest of drawers made about 1770 and now in the collection of Berkeley plantation, Charles City, Va.

If the cabinet on chest is rare in American furniture, the cabinet on stand is even more so. The black walnut example shown here is among the few known colonial examples. It has a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of ownership in the Gregory family at Elsing Green plantation in King William County, Va. With slender cabriole legs and voluted knee blocks, the cabinet's overall form is similar to British baroque examples. Yet the design also suggests the maker's awareness of cabinets in the neat and plain style like the one in Chippendale's 1754 Director. The exterior ornamentation of cabinets changed dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century, but the configuration of the drawered interiors remained essentially the same.
InscribedNone.
MarkingsNone.
ProvenanceThe cabinet was in a New England collection for much of the twentieth century. It was sold at auction through Skinner, Inc., Bolton, Mass., in 1986, where it was purchased by Sumpter Priddy III. Priddy sold the piece to CWF the same year. Following its acquisition, Riva Gregory Glave recognized the cabinet as the one owned by her grandfather, Judge Roger Gregory, and used at his home, Elsing Green, in King William Co., Va. After his death, the cabinet passed to his son, Roger Gregory, who sold it in the 1920s.