by Leigh Keno
A few collectors make a game of this area of study by buying only the furniture of one region. Some prefer Boston or Newport furniture; others collect Connecticut River Valley pieces made of maple or cherry wood; still others restrict themselves to Philadelphia. Eddy Nicholson preferred to buy the best of every region, which offered him the widest range of possibility. I was still a recent arrival to Christie’s American Furniture Department when Eddy made auction history by purchasing the first piece of American furniture to top the $1 million mark at auction—an exquisite Philadelphia tea table. Nearly ten years later, in 1995, long after I had become a private dealer, I would buy that table for a client at Nicholson’s housecleaning sale for $2,422,500, a price that again set a record for the form.
The first time I saw the table close-up, it was sitting in the office of my boss, Dean Failey, having just been delivered from the home of the consignor. Dean’s office was a cluttered space that always seemed to be overflowing with the numerous bits of auction life that invariably build up before each sale—furniture files, receipts books, research materials, and hundreds of photographs and transparencies. With nothing more flattering than the fluorescent light radiating down from the drop ceiling to showcase its form, the table still managed to stand with the utmost of chic and poise.
The light bounced off the table’s largest horizontal face—the highly figured mahogany board of the circular top—warming the rich chocolate grain of the wood. Large, perfectly flat tops of this type require great talent to make and, in addition, this one featured a raised rim that moved in and out in a crisply delineated scalloped pattern (often termed a piecrust top because of its obvious resemblance to that baked form). The scalloped-edge design, inspired by contemporary London tea tray designs, was perfected by Philadelphia’s cabinetmakers during the height of that city’s rococo period, when this table was made.
Centered beneath the lush reflective surface of the top was a small open-air boxlike structure—often termed a birdcage—that featured four miniature balusters, one marking each corner. The birdcage was attached to the center shaft of the table, which in turn led down to the tripod base, and it housed a mechanism that allowed the table to pivot from a horizontal to a vertical position (thus inspiring a second popular name for the form, tilt-top tea table) and also rotate to facilitate the ceremony of tea. The action of the table played right into the mid-eighteenth-century fascination with theatricality and function-specific furniture. (How elegant, a table just for tea!) The tilt top allowed for the table to be stored easily at the perimeter of a room when it was not in use.
I pinched my right thumb and forefinger around the shaped edge of the rim and ran them along its undulant scalloped course—so perfectly planned and rhythmically proportioned. As expected, the dense mahogany wood felt smooth and cool to the touch. My hand remained on the edge of the pivot top as I crouched down to get a closer look at the shaft. I counted an astounding twenty-two flutes running down the face of its length, giving it the appearance of a Grecian pillar (twelve or fourteen of these concave channels is a more usual amount to see). By choosing so elaborate a design, the carver was effectively flaunting his virtuoso technique, yet the result was refined and seemingly effortless. Near the bottom of the shaft, the fluting was halted by a compressed sphere, or ball, that seemed to bulge outward in response to the weight of the large top above. I marveled at the craftsman’s technique—that he was able to convey such plasticity of form with so unforgiving a medium as dense mahogany wood.
Beneath the ball was a reel-like passage in the shaft that was shaped rather like an empty spool of thread. It fed into the tripod base, which was formed by a trio of cabriole legs that each curved outward and then down into a tapering reverse curve. Each leg was finished with a foot designed to emulate the taloned grasp of a bird of prey, clutching a ball instead of its next meal. As with the compressed ball I had admired on the shaft, the cabinetmaker had manipulated the animalistic spring of the legs to convey the ample weight of the top. Like the legs of a weight lifter grasping barbells on the rise, each leg seemed braced in order to bear the heft of the tabletop above. Meanwhile, the balls trapped between each claw flattened in added response to the gesture.
I lingered over this table for such a long time because I knew another example of similar eloquence and beauty probably would not cross my path again soon. During the twenty-five years or so of Philadelphia’s reigning rococo style, only a handful of top-level craftsmen were able to produce tables as graceful and powerful as this one, and very few have turned up. Adding to its rarity was the fact that a table such as this would have been produced for only the wealthiest of customers—one who was willing to pay extra for the highly figured mahogany wood, the vivid scalloping, and the elaborate carving of the shaft and legs. Each detail added to the final price of the piece at the time it was made, and adds to its value today.
Admiring the table in Dean’s office brought to mind only one other nearly identical example, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Morrison Heckscher, the curator of American Decorative Arts there, heard of the piece at Christie’s, he invited my colleague John Hays (now the director of the American Furniture and Decorative Arts Department at Christie’s) and me to bring the table to the museum so that we could do a side-by-side comparison of the two. So on a Monday morning, when the museum was closed, we took the table over there. Seeing this magnificent pair, certainly born of the same cabinet shop, united in the hushed gallery was really a thrill. The two tables were clearly twins in terms of their design, with only the subtlest variations in the surface decoration to distinguish them. Most of the differences were found in the handling of the wavy leaf carving that edged down the front of each leg and spread around the curve of the compressed ball, like a series of vines growing around a garden folly. In each case, the carving—so fluid, it seemed to have been hewn from soft butter—added up to the essence of rococo style. Even the bottoms of the feet were fitted with identical brass casters imported from England, which were quite expensive in the eighteenth century. (Later research done by Luke Beckerdite, an exceptional scholar in the realm of Philadelphia’s rococo furniture, revealed that both tables were the work of an immigrant craftsman named Hercules Courtenay [1744?–1784]. Before he moved to Philadelphia, Courtenay had been a student of the great London craftsman Thomas Johnson [1714–1778], one of the most active proponents of English rococo style.)
On the day of its sale, the table turned on the dais, facing what was, not surprisingly, a near-capacity crowd. Auctioneer Brian Cole opened the bidding at $550,000, after which the room grew unusually still. Nothing happened—no paddles, no hands—for what seemed an eternity. Suddenly, one of the staff signaled a telephone bid of $575,000 and the numbers began to climb, not stopping until they reached $950,000. With the buyer’s 10 percent premium added, that made the final price for the table $1,045,000. A handful of reporters covering the sale rushed to catch a word with Eddy Nicholson, the new owner, who had been bidding openly in the room.
An interesting footnote to the sale of that table is that when I purchased it in January 1995, I learned that during his period of ownership, Eddy had sent the table to the conservators at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware for a cleaning. Cleaning is a dirty word in American furniture because most experts have come to view the grunge and dirt that settle into the finish of an object over a period of two centuries as a valuable commodity. Original finish sells because it helps guarantee authenticity. Why remove a patina that has taken so long to develop? It’s like hitting the erase button on a tape recording of the object’s life.
But the type of cleaning Eddy had in mind for the table was similar to the painstaking work done on an old master painting. The piece was worked over in a lab, quarter inch by quarter inch, with nothing larger than a cotton swab, and the original shellac finish was never penetrated. I wouldn’t have recommended it, but at least he approached it the right way. When I bought the table in 1995, I rec
eived a packet from Mark Anderson, the vigilant Winterthur conservator in charge of the project. It was a plastic bag filled with the table’s original dirt—cotton swabs and all. I later sent it on to the table’s present owner, thinking to myself, Well, now he has the whole table.
When I left Christie’s to start my own firm in March 1986, Eddy Nicholson was one of the first people to offer his congratulations and support. His encouragement meant a great deal to me. It was my ambition, of course, to work with savvy clients such as Eddy, so the fact that he expressed confidence in my abilities and was not put off by my youth (I was twenty-eight) felt like a hearty slap on the back.
I had long looked forward to opening my own shop and no longer having to answer to a corporate boss, but it was still unsettling when the day finally arrived. I felt as if I had taken a leap forward, but I couldn’t quite make out the place where I would land. In the beginning, my tiny studio apartment in an old baroque-style town house just off Fifth Avenue on East Seventy-fifth Street doubled as my office. I still remember the first inquiry I received, literally the day after I had incorporated myself. It was from a man who wanted to know if I handled old cigar boxes. After explaining to him that collectibles really weren’t my focus, I hung up the phone, praying that things would get better.
Not five minutes later, the phone rang again. This time, the call was from Gary Sergeant, a Connecticut-based antiques dealer specializing in English and European furnishings, who was familiar to me from the salesrooms at Christie’s. Gary was calling on behalf of a New Jersey clock dealer named Steve Petrucelli, who had recently puchased from a neighbor a pair of chairs that he believed were American. Steve wanted the chairs to be examined by someone with expertise in American furniture, and Gary had suggested me (with the understanding that if I bought the chairs, he would get a commission on the deal).
Well, the chairs sounded far more promising than the cigar boxes, so the next morning I found myself entering Steve Petrucelh’s modest home in Cranbury, New Jersey, in the company of Gary Sergeant. The pair of chairs—or what was left of them—stood just to the left of the entrance foyer. Chair is actually a generous term for what I first saw that day. These things looked like a matched pair of stools, each with a seemingly incongruous post rising off its back, and nothing else.
I approached the two with a combination of wonderment and awe, for despite all that was obviously missing from their design, there was something unmistakably beautiful about the forms that remained. I bent over and picked up one of the pair and was immediately struck by the heft of the wood. No doubt it was constructed of dense mahogany, an exotic plum-toned hardwood imported from places such as Honduras, Suriname, and the West Indies. Mahogany was used on the priciest furniture throughout the colonies, but it found particular favor in Newport during that city’s stylistic heyday, the 1760s through the 1780s. As I bent closer to study the flecked grain of the wood, I began to suspect that I might be in the presence of two highly unusual pieces.
Lifting and tipping the chair also brought the legs into full view. The rear legs were simple, unadorned backswept squared shafts, but the front legs were far more elaborate. They each took the form of two sturdy S-curved cabriole legs that narrowed at the ankle to end in full-blown claw-and-ball feet. There was something very distinctive about the execution of these feet, and I had seen it a few times before, always on furniture attributed to the Newport cabinetmaker John Goddard (1723/4–1785). Goddard, a cabinetmaker of considerable skill, was part of a family of craftsmen who, along with their neighbors the Townsends, were largely responsible for Newport’s brief rise to artistic prominence just after the mid-1700s. These two Quaker families were closely bound by ties of apprenticeship and marriage, and together they managed to produce an astounding number of exceptionally talented craftsmen, most of whom achieved a profoundly elegant yet conservative aesthetic. Drop either family name in reference to a piece of furniture near a serious collector of Americana and you are bound to elicit a smile (and perhaps an increase in pulse).
John Goddard was a fairly prolific member of the clan. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of his work is the robust manner in which he carved his claw-and-ball feet. His claws look far more animalistic than, say, the birdlike talons that I had admired on the Philadelphia tea table when I was still at Christie’s. The knuckles always appear slender and tall, although swollen at the joints, with each digit well delineated. Furthermore, Goddard tended to carve the balls held within the claws, taller than they were wide, thus forcing a powerful tension into the tendons stretching taut above the spheres below. Such were the feet of the chair I held in my hands.
I set the chair back down on the ground and placed both my palms down on the center of the seat. I took a breath and then spread my hands in opposite directions across the equator of its balloonlike shape, ignoring the busy Victorian needlework pattern that passed beneath my moving fingertips. When I reached the opposite ends of the seat, my hands dipped down across the smooth exposed mahogany sides to the underbelly of the chair and then continued inward until they met again at the center of the seat. I arched my hands and pushed gently up at the center, easily slipping the seat (thus the popular term slip seat) out of the chair frame. I briskly flipped this over and was thrilled to see that beneath that loud nineteenth-century Victorian cover, the original eighteenth-century maple seat frame still existed, complete with the chair’s original linen webbing, muslin, and horsehair stuffing. It is extremely rare to see original upholstery ingredients survive two hundred years of use, and I was excited. But as I returned the slip seat to the embrace of the chair’s frame, I was also reminded of the problems looming just above seat level.
I was about to ask Steve what had happened to the rest of the chairs, when I noticed a small pile of dark wood gathered on the floor to the left of the pair. I must have visibly winced at the realization that in that pile lay the answer to my unasked question, for Steve quickly stepped in and began to explain the story of the chairs. They had been found, he said, on the second floor of a chicken coop at a local farm. For a short time, the space had been used as a clubhouse by some neighborhood kids, which probably accounted for their sorry state. The seat frames and legs had remained intact, but the rest of the parts had been scattered about in the hay (which accounted for the bits of straw that I found myself brushing aside as I crouched down to try to make sense of the jumble).
I shook my head in disbelief at the concept of this strange scenario. The places people choose to stash antique furniture never cease to amaze me. That these objects had somehow managed to survive the indignities of a chicken coop stood as a testament to the integrity of their design. I sifted through the pile and managed first to extract one perfect, unblemished crest rail, marked at the center by a wonderfully expressive scallop shell with a clearly delineated pattern of concave and convex channels carved in simulation of a shell’s lobed back. The crest rail is the yoke-shaped top rail that is most often grasped when a chair is pulled back from a table. It is a key design component and acts like a lid to the rest of the chair’s back. The stiles fit directly into the recesses of its ends, while the decorative back splat (the upright central support) locks into its center. Because the crest rail is one of the most heavily handled parts of a chair, it can, on occasion, loosen and fall off. Once the crest rail is missing, then the other parts of the back may soon follow.
A voluptuous shell marks the center of a chair’s crest rail.
Finding that freestanding crest rail and then moments later an identical one, also intact, gave me hope. Perhaps these chairs could be saved. Piece by piece, like a jig-saw puzzle, I reassembled the backs of the chairs on the floor. I sometimes think of back splats as the Rorschach test of American furniture. What will the viewer see in the design? Here, for example, the pattern could be interpreted a number of ways. Did the pair of matching back splats look like two large Grecian urns composed of curving ribbonlike lines, or did they appear more like two highly stylized pretzels? The
n, too, there was the airy shape of a hawk-nosed bird formed by the negative space between the outer edges of the splat sides and the arched curve of the stiles. Whatever the interpretation, I thought the pattern of the chair backs closely resembled the back splats displayed on a well-photographed and much-celebrated round-about chair (also called a corner chair because it features two back splats that face each other at a right angle) that had a history of ownership in the prominent Brown family of Providence. An image of that chair popped into my mind as I played with the pieces on the floor, particularly since that chair bore an attribution to the hand of John Goddard. The similarity in design among the chairs helped guide my still-forming opinion of the objects.
A pair of slip seats and the fragments of a single chair back.
Using a handful of red rubber bands that Steve found in a kitchen drawer, we slowly began to bind the disassembled parts to the two surviving chair frames. Miraculously, the pieces held, and in less than ten minutes we had one complete chair (save a few chips here and there) and the second one nearly finished. All that was missing was one twelve-inch section of a vertical stile from the backrest. It was frustrating to be just a foot away from a complete pair of chairs, particularly since I was certain the two could be linked to the Newport master craftsman John Goddard.
I looked at Steve and asked him if we definitely had seen all the broken pieces. He nodded his head in assent. I explained to him that I thought Goddard had made these profoundly beautiful chairs but that the missing passage definitely detracted from their value. Given their condition, I told him, I would be willing to pay a price in the low five figures. Steve agreed to my price and I wrote him my first check as a dealer. With the paperwork done, we loaded the chairs into the van that Gary and I had driven to New Jersey that day. Gary was already in the driver’s seat and had the engine running when I slammed the back doors closed and turned to face Steve one more time. Something in my gut told me to try again.