Dining table

Date1745-1760

OriginAmerica, Virginia, Rappahannock River Basin

MediumCherry, black walnut, and white pine (by microanalysis).

DimensionsOH: 28 5/8"; OW(closed): 17"; OW(open): 51" OD: 48 1/4"

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1991-162

DescriptionAppearance: Drop-leaf oval dining table; four cabriole legs with pad feet and bifurcated knees flanked by voluted C-scrolls; straight end rails.

Construction: The rule-joined leaves are suspended from iron butt hinges. The top is fixed to the frame with screws driven from below through three battens, two perpendicular to the side rails and a third placed diagonally at the center. All three battens are dovetailed into the top of the frame. An additional diagonal batten spans the bottom center of the frame. Wrought nails driven through the inner rails secure the fixed hinge rails; the swing hinge rails pivot on finger joints. The inner rails are dovetailed to the end rails at the rabbeted corners where they join the rabbeted stile of the hinge leg when the leaves are down. The other two corners of the frame are mortised and tenoned and secured with pins. As on many British tables, the original knee blocks were glued to the outer face of the rails rather than to their lower edges.

Materials: Cherry top, leaves, end rails, hinge rails, legs, and upper frame battens; black walnut lower frame batten; white pine inner rails (by microanalysis).
Label TextUnlike the vast majority of early southern dining tables, this Virginia example is conspicuously late baroque in character. Its legs take the form of slender cyma curves, each flanked by a pair of large carved C-scrolls with voluted terminals that enframe a V-shaped ornament. Rarely seen in American work, the design represents a simplified version of a British late baroque knee composition in which acanthus carving splits to form voluted knee blocks. Raised pad feet and a rounded top complete the table's late baroque aspect.

The table descended in the Carter family of Richmond County, Virginia, on the lower Rappahannock River, and belongs to a growing body of related objects with histories in counties that flank the river between the Chesapeake Bay and the fall-line town of Fredericksburg. Among the characteristics many of these pieces share is their fabrication in cherry, one of the most common primary woods in the Rappahannock basin during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Shapely cabriole legs and deep aprons like those seen here are also common to the group. The knees on many of these objects are flanked either by C-scrolls or by carved flanges that may represent streamlined versions of the same ornament.

These pieces clearly represent the work of several shops with a shared design vocabulary. While their histories in a small geographic area and their execution in cherry and yellow pine point to an origin within or adjacent to the Rappahannock basin, at present it is difficult to ascertain exactly where the shops were located. Fredericksburg, an important port town after 1750, is a good candidate, as is Tappahannock, a much smaller port in Essex County. Despite their relative sophistication, some of the objects may even come from shops in rural areas since records reveal that as many as two dozen artisans who described themselves as "cabinetmakers" resided in the counties of Essex, King and Queen, King George, Middlesex, Richmond, and Westmoreland between 1730 and 1780.

A table in the MESDA collection offers a clue to the identification of the shop that produced the CWF table (MESDA acc. 2024-27). Made of black walnut and sporting most of the same structural and ornamental details encountered on the CWF table (including the split knee), the MESDA table was certainly produced in the same shop. That table is signed "M. Ashton," likely the name of the cabinetmaker, in the largely inaccessible area between the frame and the top. Although no one with the first initial "M" has been discovered to date, early records confirm that the overwhelming majority of the Ashton family resided in King George County just south of Fredericksburg.

InscribedNone.
MarkingsNone.
ProvenanceThe table has an oral tradition of ownership in the Carter family of Richmond Co., Va. It was sold in 1990 by Mrs. Landon Carter Brown to Baltimore antiques dealer Michael Flanigan, from whom it was acquired by Sumpter Priddy III. CWF acquired the table from Priddy in 1991.