Chest of Drawers with Secretary

Date1770-1780

MediumCherry and yellow pine.

DimensionsOH: 37 1/2"; OW: 37 1/2"; OD: 20 1/2"

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1990-178

DescriptionAppearance: chest of four graduated drawers with conforming top molded on front and side edges; cavetto base molding with four (new) straight bracket feet; each drawer with thumbnail-molded edges, plate escutcheons, and two plate-and-bail pulls; top drawer is secretary drawer with front that drops on standard table hinges; shaped secretary drawer sides resemble stair brackets; interior has five small drawers with ring pulls and three small pigeon holes without valances.

Construction: The top with its integral molded edges is fixed to the case sides with two sliding dovetails. The bottom board is dovetailed to the sides. One-half-inch-deep drawer blades are half-dovetailed to the case sides. The joints are concealed with thin strips of cherry glued and nailed to the front edges of the case sides. The drawer blades are backed with dustboards of the same thickness set into dadoes. The top dustboard stops one inch from the back, while the second and third stop four inches from the back. The butt-joined horizontal backboards are nailed into rabbets at the top and sides and flush-nailed at the bottom. A mitered framework is glued to the case bottom along the front and sides and partly along the back. A triangular block is glued to the case bottom at each corner of this framework. The base molding is glued and nailed to the edges of the framework along the front and sides. No evidence for the attachment of the original feet survives.

The large drawers are dovetailed at the corners. Flat, unbeveled bottom boards are set into rabbets at the front and sides with wrought nails. The joints were originally covered with six-inch- to ten-inch-long close set strips mitered at the front and rear corners. The bottoms are flush-nailed at the rear.

The secretary drawer has top and bottom boards nailed into rabbets on the drawer sides. The backboard is also nailed into rabbets. The dividers for the small interior drawers are dadoed into the top, bottom, and side boards. The small drawers are dovetailed at the corners. Their flat bottom boards are glued (and now nailed) into rabbets on all four sides.

Materials: Cherry top, sides, drawer blades, base molding, secretary drawer front, secretary bottom board, secretary top board, secretary side boards, small drawer fronts, small drawer divider facings, and large drawer fronts; all other elements of yellow pine.

Label TextChests of drawers and variations thereof came into common use in England during the 1620s and began to appear in American estate inventories from New England to Virginia within a few decades. Joiners in Massachusetts were producing chests of drawers by the 1650s, and the survival of two seventeenth-century Virginia court cupboards confirms that the southern artisans were also capable of producing such complex case furniture. Yet no contemporary southern chests of drawers have been discovered, and they probably were not produced in large numbers. Due to the region's agricultural economy and the near absence of towns before 1680, most such goods were simply imported. As historian Robert Beverley (ca. 1673-1722) lamented of his fellow Virginians in 1705, "they have all their Wooden Ware from England," including "their Cabinets, Chairs, Tables, Stools, [and] Chests," despite the presence of abundant forests.

The earliest extant southern-made chests of drawers date from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a period that coincides with sustained growth in the region's urban centers and the consequent appearance of localized cabinetmaking traditions. Produced in larger numbers as the century progressed, most chests of drawers made in southern cities before the 1780s looked much like the one shown here, with straight sides and facades, straight bracket feet, and a series of four graduated drawers. Modeled on British neat and plain examples and exhibiting the usual array of sound structural details found in urban southern case furniture, these objects sometimes vary surprisingly little from place to place.

Outward similarities aside, the CWF chest of drawers differs from most coeval southern examples in one important way: a writing drawer, or "secretary" in period parlance, was substituted for the topmost conventional drawer. With complements of interior pigeonholes and small drawers, secretary drawers functioned like standard slant-front desks by providing a folding writing surface and a space for papers and writing equipment that could be locked. The principal difference lay in the fact that, when closed, the secretary looked like an ordinary drawer, thus concealing its function.

A late colonial date of production for the present chest is indicated by the thumbnail-molded drawers, the mid-eighteenth-century molding profiles, the placement of the large rococo drawer pulls well in from the edges of the case, and the absence of cut nails in the construction. While structural details such as full-thickness dustboards reveal the artisan's familiarity with urban furniture-making practices, the execution of the secretary implies that the maker was unacquainted with the format. Instead of fitting the fall board with the side-mounted quadrant hinges that later became standard in such applications, the cabinetmaker hung the drawer front on a pair of plain butt hinges, leaving the writing surface virtually unsupported. Unsure how to handle the shaping of the drawer's side panels, he settled on a design that looks suspiciously like an inverted architectural stair bracket in both shape and size. Having never seen or made a secretary drawer, the artisan may simply have improvised.

In addition to physical evidence, the early production of this form in eastern Virginia can be documented by the fragmentary daybook of cabinetmaker Robert Cockburn, working in Fredericksburg or adjacent Falmouth and later in Orange County. Covering the years from 1767 to 1777, the book records orders received by the shop and work completed on a daily basis. On January 23, 1767, the artisan noted the completion of a "Chist [of] Drawers With [De]sk Draw in Top," an apt description of the piece discussed here.

InscribedNumbers are penciled on the bottoms of some of the small drawers.
MarkingsNo.
ProvenanceThe chest was owned by the Morecock family of Williamsburg during the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. It then descended to Mildred Morecock Kauffman of Charlottesville, Va., from whose estate CWF was purchased it in 1990.