by Leigh Keno
To date, the most important object that I have ever ushered to the auction block remains the gorgeous mahogany secretary-bookcase that I discussed in the first chapter of this book—the one that was found in Paris. I feel it is unlikely that another piece will ever be found that rivals it in execution (though, of course, I'll never rule anything out). For Leigh, the secretary also had milestone potential. I knew he would take great pleasure in helping to place a piece of this caliber with a client. As I said earlier, it was not an object for beginners, which meant there was only a handful of collectors who really deserved the privilege of owning it and safeguarding it for future generations. But as the date of the secretary's sale loomed, I remained surprisingly unclear as to Leigh's intentions regarding the piece. It was obvious that he was as captivated by the beauty and grand majesty of the secretary as I—but was he going to take a shot at it? Did he have a client in the wings? What was his goal that day in the crowded salesroom at Sotheby's when the maple bedstead spun out of view on the auction room dais and the towering secretary took center stage? When I looked hard into his eyes just before the bidding opened, I had only my intuition as a guide.
I first saw the secretary in a set of photographs given to me by my colleague Bill Stahl (who in addition to being one of Sotheby's chief auctioneers is also the head of the American Furniture and Decorative Arts Division). A representative from our Paris office had sent him the pictures, along with a request for an estimate. “All the outer hardware is solid silver,” Bill said as he laid the pile of snapshots on my desk.
Silver hardware on what looked to be a mid-eighteenth-century Newport secretary—the block-and-shell carved doors of the upper case were a dead giveaway—I had never before seen such extravagance on an American piece. What more did this object have in store? I wanted to see the secretary right away, but I would have to wait a number of years before I was officially invited to do so. (I was later told only half-jokingly by Alexandre Pradère—then the head of Sotheby's French Furniture Department in Paris and now a private art consultant—that the staff at Sotheby's Paris bureau began to dread my near-monthly calls for updates.) The family who owned the secretary was not fully committed to selling the piece until early April 1998. Within days of receiving the go-ahead, I flew to Paris and promptly went to meet the owners and view the secretary in a small apartment on the Right Bank.
Joining me on my visit was Alexandre Pradère, an elegant, erudite man, whose generous smile no doubt served him well at putting potential clients at ease. Was it my eagerness to see the secretary or the many flights of stairs leading up to the apartment that made my heart beat so rapidly? Whatever the cause, I arrived at the threshold literally panting in anticipation. And when the door was opened by one of the two men in attendance that day, I instantly caught sight of the dazzling case piece over his shoulder, standing against the far wall of the living room.
I think the owners enjoyed the look of pure wonderment that instantly crossed my face. After we all filed through the entrance foyer into the living room, I quickly positioned myself directly in front of the secretary and began to drink in the beauty of its details. This was clearly a piece from the Goddard and Townsend school, but the design was anything but traditional. For example, most Early American tall case pieces—Newport or otherwise—feature an S-shaped swan's-neck pediment, such as the one displayed on the Tillinghast high chest of drawers. But this one featured a semicircular, or dome-shaped, pediment, which gave the structure tremendous architectural presence: It looked like the doorway to a northern Italian villa designed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Juxtaposed against the angled geometries of the beamed ceiling, the overall sweep was bold and graphic.
The Gilder family secretary.
I tried to think of a stylistic precedent for a dome-top case piece in the colonies. All I could come up with was a Philadelphia secretary desk and bookcase, once owned by the Gilder family of Burlington County, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, that Leigh had purchased at Christie's back in the early 1990s on behalf of the Dietrich American Foundation. But one Philadelphia secretary hardly constitutes a trend. Furthermore, the interpretation of the dome shape on the Gilder piece was quite different from the version on the secretary before me. The first featured a single recessed panel in the tympanum, whereas the second displayed a smooth-faced pair of side-by-side panels that projected outward toward the viewer.
The pictures that I had kept in my desk drawer in New York had barely revealed the quality of the plum-pudding mahogany used on the Paris secretary. The brilliant mottled pattern of the wood was as vibrant as a leopard's spots. Now warmed by the sunlight streaming in through a set of nearby windows, it had the lush, swirled appearance of freshly poured paint.
I stepped closer to the piece and noticed the reflected movement of my figure in the mirrorlike surface of the long solid-silver escutcheons that surrounded the keyholes of the cabinet doors. I am accustomed to seeing only gold-toned brass hardware on Colonial American furniture, so the contrast offered by the silver-white metal was startling. It offset the coloration of the mahogany in a whole new way, bringing out the purplish undertones in the wood. I bent down to touch one of the pierced Chippendale drawer pulls displayed on the drawers (in outline, it looked like a bat with its wings spread) and gently flipped up the attached bail, or hoop-shaped, handle. There, on the underside of the pull, I saw the name S. Casey stamped in big block letters. During the course of my examination of the rest of the piece, I would find more than a dozen initialed or scripted markings left by the maker, who was understandably proud of his contribution to the secretary. Casey had even signed the elaborate bird-shaped lopers (meaning the decorative hand pulls that fronted the pocket side runners used to support the hinged slant lid). The pair looked like a whimsical pair of cuckoo birds popping from a clock.
I felt honored to be in the presence of such an unusual and magnificent piece and said as much to the owners, who had retreated to a nearby seating area with Alexandre. I then asked for and received permission to examine the interior of the secretary. I began by opening the block-and-shell carved doors of the upper case. The doors swung smoothly on their small silver hinges, revealing an interior fitted with three graduated rows of pigeonholes, all jam-packed with papers and books. Despite the clutter, the stylish arrangement of the space was undeniable. Each of the dividers that formed the individual compartments was crafted of the same vibrant plum-pudding mahogany used on the exterior of the piece. Furthermore, the scalloped silhouette of each divider seemed to form the profile of a bird, which directly related to the design of those exquisite silver lopers.
Right: One of the secretary's silver bird lopers with green stone eyes.
The secretary's elaborately fitted interior includes bird-shaped compartment dividers that relate to the form of the lopers.
As I scanned the interior of the upper case, my attention was naturally drawn to the decorative compartment—offset by matched Doric columns—that was centered on the second shelf. The trade term for this device is prospect compartment, and I have often seen similar ones used on Boston secretary-bookcases from the 1740s and 1750s. Usually, this area masks a hidden compartment or two, so I grasped the sides of one of the columns and pulled to see if it was removable. As I suspected, that column (like its mate on the other side) fronted a small vertical storage compartment. In addition, the three-inch-high serpentine base of the prospect compartment disguised yet a third drawer. Without a handhold to call attention to its facade, however, the drawer was quite literally hidden in plain sight.
Next I turned to the slant-front desk. Before opening the lid, I reached out with both hands to hook my forefingers around the curve of the beak on each of the silver-shaped lopers. The cold metal felt refreshing against my skin. Only the head and shoulders moved when I pulled on the beak to drag the desk's support bars out of their pockets, because the body of each bird was anchored to the desk by a silver screw set in the center of its belly. When the braces
were fully extended, I drew down the slant-lid top and began to examine the writing interior. It was organized with two banks of three blocked short drawers (the uppermost ones being fan-carved) centering six pigeonholes capped by delicate arched mahogany valances. A carved fan that matched the two displayed on the side banks of drawers also topped the small prospect door at the center of the desk.
Interestingly, all the hardware on the interior of the desk, and, in fact, on the interior of the entire case piece, was fashioned of brass rather than of the costly silver seen on the exterior. (I guess the client had to draw the line somewhere in terms of extravagance.) As a result, though, the brass brought out the reddish undertones in the wood, just as the silver had drawn out the purple. The cabinetmaker had been so fastidious in carrying out this plan that the three hinges of the slant-top lid (technically interior hardware) were made of silver, rather than brass, because slivers of their rounded backs remained visible along the lid's edge when the writing compartment was closed.
I grasped one of the circular brass knobs and pulled out one of the desk drawers. I was surprised to see that the drawer sides and the back were all crafted of the same vibrant mahogany used on the show surface. Plum-pudding mahogany was among the most costly woods used on eighteenth-century American case pieces (and probably the rarest type of mahogany imported from the West Indies). Out of curiosity, I immediately pulled out a few more drawers in the desk area (all crafted of solid mahogany) and then bent down to the long drawers of the lower case to compare their makeup. The term secondary wood simply did not apply to this secretary. It was amazing. Furthermore, the interior woods—which, to my mind, only the mice would see—were finished like a primary surface. Very often, cabinetmakers neglect to sand or plane the back of a drawer or backboard in order to save on time and labor. (At times, I have gone over an otherwise-elaborate case piece, only to find remnants of tree bark on the drawer bottoms or backboard.) Not so here: Even the wedge-shaped dovetails seen on the backs of the drawers were as fitted as the sprockets of a clock by the famous Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé. In a lifetime of viewing masterpieces of Americana, I had never seen such attention to detail.
With the secretary now unfolded before me—the doors drawn open, the desk exposed—I stepped back and assessed the overall design anew. Once again, my eyes traveled to that incredible domed top. Suddenly, it struck me that the semicircular shape served as a leitmotif for the secretary. For example, the pediment was offset with three smooth-sided urn-shaped finials capped by a perfect half sphere before they merged into an unusually elongated spiral twist. (Typically, a Newport finial features more of a fluted, cupcake-shaped body with a short swirl above.) The diminutive wood valances that crowned the four central pigeonholes of the top shelf were also clearly designed in direct visual reference to the domed top—a theme that continued (in variation) in the valanced slots of the prospect compartment and writing-desk interior.
I still wanted to get a closer look at the pediment itself, so I borrowed a tall steplad-der from the kitchen and climbed up. It was only from that higher perch that I could see that the backboard of the bonnet had been cut out to echo the front scroll of the tympanum board (often they are not shaped, but simply finished straight across). It was the type of detail that could only be appreciated from atop a ladder, as I was, or on the ground from twenty feet away.
The dome-shaped turnings of the finials echo the form of the bonnet top.
I was now eye-to-eye with the finials, so I wrapped my hand around the urn-shaped body of the right-hand one and gently eased it off the slender fluted plinth, into which it fit like a peg. Despite its small size, it was solid and heavy, which made sense, considering it was made of the same dense mahogany as the rest of the case. The wear patterns on the form (there were a few nicks and scratches) seemed thoroughly in keeping with the distances I knew the secretary had traveled. Still, I turned the finial over to examine the end grain of the peg for signs of checking, the telltale grid pattern that indicates moisture loss and age. (Remember how the marble-smooth pads of the feet on the two chairs I had examined on the Sotheby's loading dock revealed them to be reproductions?) Everything looked as it should.
The more I absorbed of the secretary, the more curious I became about its history. What sort of a person had had the means and inspiration to commission such an object? I turned to the two owners and asked them to fill me in on the history of the secretary within their family.
The Reverend Nathaniel Appleton.
One of the two men acted as spokesperson and carefully began to outline what the family knew. Traditionally, the first owner of the secretary was said to be the Reverend Nathaniel Appleton (1693–1784), the long-serving minister of the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1717 until his death (he also had significant land holdings in Massachusetts and parts of what would later become Maine and Vermont). I found it surprising that a clergyman would have commissioned what was surely the most expensive piece of furniture made in eighteenth-century America. Curious, too, was why a Cambridge minister would have looked to Newport for such an object when he had the resources of cosmopolitan Boston at his disposal. Perhaps the secretary had been presented to him as a gift.
At this point, the French gentleman produced a small lithograph reproduction of a seventeenth-century portrait, a print that he had taken out in anticipation of my visit. It was a childhood rendering of Henry Gibbs of Boston, the son of a prosperous Boston merchant turned minister, who also became a minister. Gibbs was also the father of seven children, including Margaret, the wife of the Reverend Nathaniel Appleton.
I was amazed to hear of Appleton's connection to the Gibbs family. The portrait was, in fact, already familiar to me because the original oil on canvas is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Painted in 1670, the work is considered by many to be an icon of early American portraiture (along with the two accompanying paintings done by the same anonymous artist of Henry's siblings, Robert and Margaret). In each of the paintings, the figures stand against a black-and-white checkerboard floor and are dressed expensively in clothes trimmed with velvet and lace, as befitted the Anglocentric social aspiration of their parents (they could easily be mistaken for the children of an Elizabethan aristocrat). Historian Wayne Craven once suggested that if the religious fervor of the children's father overlapped his success as a trader, then his offspring were probably raised in an atmosphere that reflected the two most powerful influences of their day—mercantilism and the church. Craven's insight gave me some fresh perspective on the secretary. Perhaps Appleton and his wife felt similarly at ease, sliding between the two realms—patrons, one might say, of a new kind of Puritan chic.
The French gentleman explained to me that when Appleton passed away in 1784, the secretary was given to his son, Nathaniel Appleton, Jr. (1731–1789). At that point, Nathaniel the younger was a prosperous businessman; he had started out in general trade but then gradually shifted the focus of his work to the manufacture of candles. Though the great Boston fire of July 30, 1794, is said to have destroyed Appleton's Walpole, Massachusetts, estate, the secretary survived (along with a John Singleton Copley portrait of his father, which is now in the collection of Harvard University). Soon after the death of Nathaniel Appleton, Jr., in 1789, his second wife, Rachel, may have sent the secretary to their eldest surviving son, John Appleton (1758–1829), then living in France as the American consul to Calais. The frisky John had two children out of wedlock, including his eldest son, John-James Appleton (1792–1864), who, following in his father's diplomatic footsteps, became the American diplomatic envoy to Sweden, as well as the next in line for the secretary. From then on, the secretary descended through three more generations of the Appleton family before passing into the hands of the two men (and their absent sister) before me that day.
Mrs. Nathaniel Appleton (1699–1771).
It was mind-boggling to think of the distance the secretary had covered since the time it was ma
de in Newport during the 1740s. I thought of carts drawn by horses across cobblestone streets and schooners sailing across wind-tossed seas. And yet there it stood in a modest apartment in the 17th arrondisement: poised, graceful, and surprisingly intact—except, perhaps, for a few inches lost somewhere along the way. Though the Appleton secretary stood nearly nine feet tall, there was something about its overall proportions that appeared a little off I suspected that, like many tall case pieces (such as the Tillinghast high chest of drawers), its height had been reduced, possibly to accommodate a low-ceilinged room. That height, I assumed, had been taken from the feet.
To prove my theory, I got down on the carpeted floor to peer beneath the secretary with a flashlight. Unfortunately, the tangle of shag wool prevented me from reading any details, although I did notice that the corner blocks (again made of mahogany) behind the bracket feet, which are ordinarily left rough-hewn and imprecise, were sharp and precisely rendered—as if they were meant to be seen. Ordinarily, I would have thought this unusual, if not suspect, but on a case piece crafted entirely of plum-pudding mahogany and decorated with silver mounts, it made perfect sense. Indeed, my entire perception of American furniture—and the level of craftsmanship that it could reach—changed that day in that small, modest Paris apartment. In that sense, the Appleton secretary was more than a masterpiece; it was a revelation.