Sideboard; 1795-1805 (illustrated in the catalogue of the Girl Scouts Luan Exhibition, 1929, PI. 716).

June 9, 2009

Sideboard; 1795-1805; New York (illustrated in the catalogue of the Girl Scouts Luan Exhibition, 1929, PI. 716). The following statements of Robert Adam (The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Esquires, No.1, 1773, p. 3) regarding architectural composition epitomize one aspect of his aesthetic theory which revolutionized English taste in the second half of the eighteenth century:

“Movement is meant to express, the rise and fall, the advance and recess, with other diversity of form, in the different parts of a building, so as to add greatly to the picturesque of the com¬position. For the rising and falling, advancing and receding, with the convexity and concavity, and other forms of the great parts. have the same effect in architecture, that hill and dale, fore-ground and distance, swelling and sinking have in landscape: That is, they serve to produce an agreeable and diversified contour, that groups and contrasts like a picture, and creates a variety of light and shade, which gives great spirit, beauty, and effect to the composition.”

Few other pieces of American furniture show so well such a variety of surface contours against a background of advancing and receding forms as does this great sideboard. Its conception is ceremonial, useful but not domestic.

Two years after a “Celleret Sideboard, with an Elliptic Middle and Ogee on each Side” was first listed and illustrated in the 1793 edition of The Cabinet-Makers’ London Book of Prices, a similar entry appeared in a Philadelphia edition. A year later, it was included in the first New York issue with a basic price for the simplest version of nine pounds, twelve shillings for labor-one of the higher quotations for making a piece of furniture. Although two extra legs cost only an additional seven shillings for labor, few eight-legged sideboards survive today and apparently few were made. But this sideboard, which is longer than the standard model of six feet, has many other extras. Inlaid ellipses; astragal¬ended rectangles of satinwood; triple-string outlined panels of mahogany veneers on the body; inlaid “panels [of satinwood] with a gothic top, and a hollow bottom” on three sides of the front legs; inlaid flutes at the tops of the legs; extra drawers; and “a cupboard underneath the middle drawer with two doors, sweep [curved] front” and “stiles” on either side “worked round” would make this one of the most expensive pieces of American furniture to produce. Apparently only a few were willing to pay the price.

Although this sideboard might have been made in Connecticut, where a few eight-legged sideboards with local histories of ownership are known, the character of the ornament and the presence of ash as a secondary wood seem to favor a New York attribution despite the fact that no known labeled New York sideboard, of which there are several, helps to identify this one. But on other furniture forms made in New York, triple-string outlined panels, inlaid flutes, and astragal-ended and elliptical inlaid satinwood panels are found.

Dimensions: height 41inches, width 79.5, depth 28.5 Materials: mahogany; mahogany and satinwood veneers on white pine, and light and dark wood stringing; drawer linings, tulipwood; framing, white pine with ash strips under the top.