Tilt-Top Tables Commodities I.Pdf

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COMMODITIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Sarah Neale Fayen

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Early American Culture

Spring 2002

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1408633

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ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TILT-TOP TABLES

COMMODITIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Sarah Neale Fayen

Approved: COJ^LiJtrL^x • J. Ritchie Garrison, Ph.D. Professor in charge of the thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee

Approved: James C. (Zfi^rtis, Ph.D. Director pfthe Winterthur Program in Early American Culture

Approved: JL Mark W. Huddleston, Ph.D. Acting Dean of the College of Arts and Science

Approved: 3 Conrado M. Gempesaw H, Ph.D. Vice-Provost for Academic Programs and Planning

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first and greatest thanks go to my advisor, J. Ritchie Garrison, whose creative

and concerted efforts to comprehend our material world inspired and sustained my

excitement for this project. His perfect combination of committed guidance and calm

assurance afforded me the freedom to discover my story and my voice.

At Winterthur, many people kindly listened to my questions when I stuck my

head in their offices and stopped them in the hallways. Thanks to Mark J. Anderson,

Wendy A. Cooper, Charles F. Hummel, Brock Jobe, and especially Michael S.

Podmaniczky for reading an early draft. Several curators elsewhere generously met with

me, sharing their time, research, and ideas. Thanks to Patricia E. Kane at the Yale

University Art Gallery, and Ronald L. Hurst and Wallace B. Gusler at The Colonial

Williamsburg Foundation.

To many other people I owe significant debts of gratitude: for her enthusiasm,

respect, and encouragement, special thanks to Prof. Ann Smart Martin at the University

of Wisconsin—Madison, whose scholarship has paved the way for linking everyday

objects to the historical context of consumerism; for important conversations, Thomas

Denenberg at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Philip Zea at the Society for the Preservation of

New England Antiquities, and especially Prof. Edward S. Cooke, Jr. at Yale University

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for sparking my initial interest in material culture; for sharing references, Dean

Lahikainen at the Peabody Essex Museum, and Kem Widmer II; for research assistance,

Susan Brady at the Library in the Yale Center for British Art, and Martha Rowe at the

Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts; for access and advice, Rachel Bean at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Melissa Naulin at Mount Vernon, Alexandra A. Kirtley at

the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Dennis Carr at Yale University; for her nostalgia-

inducing (and expert) revisions, Christina Cho; and finally, for listening to me talk about

tilt-top tables throughout the last year and examining them with me during all of our

travels, all my Winterthur classmates, especially Amanda Glesmann, Rob Rudd, and

Laura Simo.

Producing a master’s thesis requires significant logistical maneuvering. For their

help with the details, thanks to Susan Newton in Winterthur’s Photographic Services,

Neville Thompson in the Winterthur Library, Bert Denker in Winterthur’s Decorative

Arts Photographic Collection, Jennifer Bean Bower at the Museum of Early Southern

Decorative Arts, and Suzanne Warner at the Yale University Art Gallery.

As time passes, I become increasingly aware that whatever successes and small

triumphs I celebrate I owe entirely to my parents, George and Eugenia Fayen. My

curiosity, confidence, and general happiness have grown directly from their unfailing

encouragement, support, and love. With thanks, I dedicate this volume to them.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES...... vi

LIST OF TABLES...... ix

ABSTRACT...... x

TILT-TOP TABLES: COMMODITIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA 1

Seeing Similarity Rather than Difference...... 7

Tilt-top Tables and the 1740s...... 23

Makers...... 30

Distributors ...... 70

Buyers...... 77

U sers...... 89

Finding Cultural Meaning ...... 116

ENDNOTES...... 124

REFERENCES...... 138

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF FIGURES

Figure I. Tilt-top table ...... 2

Figure 2. Plain tops ...... 9

Figure 3. Dished tops ...... 10

Figure 4. Scalloped tops ...... 11

Figure 5. Baluster pillars ...... 12

Figure 6. Plain column pillars ...... 14

Figure 7. Plain column pillars with spiral fluted ums ...... 15

Figure 8. Plain column pillars with squat balusters, some of them carved ...... 16

Figure 9. Legs with high-arched shoulders ...... 17

Figure 10. Legs with shallow-sloped shoulders ...... 18

Figure 11. Ranges of tilt-top table sizes ...... 19

Figure 12. Tilt-top table with earliest documented manufacture date ...... 27

Figure 13. Proportion of turned shapes ...... 34

Figure 14. Cleats and block ...... 36

Figure 15. Block with a square tenon from the pillar ...... 37

Figure 16. Box mechanism ...... 39

Figure 17. Legs and pillar with top and box mechanism removed ...... 40

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 18. Tilt-top table with plain legs...... 41

Figure 19. Foot with common round profile and low-relief leaf carving ...... 43

Figure 20. Foot with common round profile and five carved toes ...... 44

Figure 21. Low-relief C-scroll carved into the vertical side of the leg ...... 46

Figure 22. High-relief C-scroll ...... 47

Figure 23. Knee carving ...... 48

Figure 24. Weight distribution ...... 50

Figure 25. Iron brace underneath the pillar and legs ...... 51

Figure 26. “Claw Tables” ...... 67

Figure 27. Silver salver (top) and scalloped top (bottom) ...... 69

Figure 28. Tilt-top table from Newport that closely resembles the tables that Patricia E. Kane identified as a “standard” type made for export...... 75

Figure 29. Goddard-Atkinson table ...... 76

Figure 30. Price differences between rectangular tea tables and circular tilt-top tables in three cities...... 80

Figure 31. “Candlestand” ...... 83

Figure 32. Silver epergne ...... 90

Figure 33. Tilt-top table assembled to fit into the comer of a room ...... 92

Figure 34. Tea canister ...... 95

Figure 35. Tea Party at the Countess Portland's...... 96

Figure 36. The Rawson Conversation Piece...... 97

Figure 37. December ...... 98

Figure 38. The Gascoigtte Family...... 100

vii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 39. A Woman Embroidering with her rwo Daughters...... 101

Figure 40. Jeronimus Tonneman and his...... Son 102

Figure 41. William Fullerton and Captain Lowis Taking Wine...... 103

Figure 42. The Carter Family...... 111

Figure 43. Needlework ...... 113

Figure 44. The First, Second, and Last Scene o f Mortality...... 115

VIII

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 1. 1772 Philadelphia Price List...... 62

TABLE 2. 1756 and 1757 Providence Price Agreement...... 79

TABLE 3. Prices of Tilt-top Tables Compared to Foodstuffs ...... 87

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

American furniture historians have long known that eighteenth-century craftsmen

constructed tilt-top tables from component parts made by other artisans. They have not

investigated, however, the significance of this proto-industrial production in the historical

contexts of craft specialization and consumerism. This thesis explores the role of tilt-top

tables made in America between 1740 and 1790 as commodities in the expanding market

economy of the British Atlantic World. In so doing, it breaks from current studies of

American furniture that focus on the work of individual craftsmen or geographic regions,

and demonstrates the benefits of researching one furniture form throughout many regions.

This thesis systematically investigates the people who made, distributed, bought,

and used tilt-top tables by examining extant examples, artisans’ records, and newspaper

advertisements. Tilt-top tables were the products of complex market-driven interactions

between artisan-entrepreneurs and consumers. Fueled by favorable economic conditions

beginning in the 1740s, both urban and rural craftsmen developed profitable business

relationships through which they exchanged tilt-top table parts and specialized services

including carving and turning. Craftsmen and merchants sold tilt-top tables at finely

gauged price levels thus allowing consumers to choose the size, wood, features, and

decoration that matched their preferences and their financial resources. Their shape,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. surface, and versatility encouraged Americans to use tilt-top tables for many activities,

including tea parties, card playing, and business transactions. Eventually, Americans

associated tilt-top tables so closely with polite social interaction that they became visual

cues for genteel respectability. Like ceramics and printed textiles that were produced

inexpensively in large volume to sell to increasingly fashion-conscious consumers of

moderate means, tilt-top tables became vehicles for the spread of refinement in America.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TILT-TOP TABLES

COMMODITIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Around 1740, craftsmen living in British North America began making a new

kind of table (fig. 1). Rather than nailing or gluing an oval or rectangular top to a joined

Same, they shaped a circular top and a central pillar on a lathe and attached three legs to

form a tripod base. Usually, the tops could tilt into a vertical position. Often they could

rotate on a box mechanism. While they could be decorated in many ways—with

scalloped tops, pillars turned in different shapes, and carved surfaces—the new tilt-top

pedestal tables looked very similar throughout the British Empire. They were made and

bought on the north shore o f Massachusetts all the way down the coast to South Carolina,

in rural towns like Windsor, Connecticut, and in big cities like New York and

Philadelphia They appeared in expensive woods like imported mahogany, but also in

cheaper woods like walnut and maple. Family members used them for reading and

writing, drinking liquor and tea, sewing, and display. Like no tables made before them,

tilt-top tables acquired cultural significance for a wide range of Americans.

Scholars have not adequately explained the sudden appearance and widespread

popularity of tilt-top tables. In the early twentieth century, collectors valued the

mahogany versions with elaborately scalloped tops for their artisanship, beauty, and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 1. Tilt-top table. Mahogany, Massachusetts. 1760-85. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1958.2778.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. presumed association with the stylish custom of tea drinking. Dubbing them “pie-crust

tea tables,” they acclaimed them (and their non-scalloped counterparts) as icons of early

American design and refinement, making them among the most “universally admired”

and “eagerly sought after" American antiques.1 In more recent years, decorative arts

historians have organized surviving tables into regional groups according to stylistic

features. They have recognized that certain combinations of turned shapes in the pillars

tend to exhibit regional patterns. Albert Sack succinctly stated these generalizations in

his 1987 article “Regionalism in Early American tea tables.”2 He argued that tilt-top

tables from Philadelphia tend to have pillars with columnar shafts above compressed

balls. Those from New England tend to have plain fluted columns or urns at the base of

the pillars, often spiral fluted. Those from New York tend to have pillars with shafts that

flared into lipped cups. While Sack acknowledged that “all the broad generalizations

made here are subject to the exceptions and inconsistencies that force us to be cautious

about making firm attributions,” his article effectively created a rigid taxonomy of tilt-top

table pillars. It suggested that only pillars of one or several types were made or available

in certain regions. A broad examination of tilt-top tables across many regions, however,

indicates that Sack’s regional patterns do not hold true. Very similar pillar forms

appeared in different regions up and down the American Atlantic coast. This wide

diffusion of tilt-top tables suggests that they carried a larger cultural meaning.

This study will explore how people in British North America constructed, sold,

bought, and used tilt-top tables between 1740 when they began appearing regularly and

1790 when Pembroke tables and other new forms in the Federal style reduced their

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. prominence. Encouraged by a favorable economy based on increased Atlantic

commerce, both urban and rural craftsmen made tilt-top tables efficiently and profitably

by developing networks of commercial exchange through which they traded table parts

and specialized services including turning and carving. Operating through new wider

systems of distribution, retailers offered tilt-top tables at many price levels to a wide

cross-section of society. Americans frequently used tilt-top tables for an array of uses

from the countless activities of everyday life to polite tea drinking and card playing, thus

allowing average Americans to integrate gentility into their lives gradually. Ultimately,

tilt-top tables were the products of complex market-driven interactions between artisan-

entrepreneurs and customers who valued them for both their convenience and their

association with genteel living. As such, they sprang from and helped fuel the consumer

revolution that swept the British Atlantic world in the mid-eighteenth century.3

This study has two primary objectives: first, to explore the cultural significance of

American tilt-top tables made between 1740 and 1790. Second, to argue for a synthetic

approach to the study of American furniture forms that builds on the regional scholarship

of recent years. Since 1976, when Charles Montgomery published “Regional Preferences

and Characteristics in American Decorative Arts: 1750-1800,” scholars have been

seeking cultural explanations for regional patterns by uncovering the furniture of

individual makers and consumers.4 Both comprehensive “regional studies” and detailed

collection catalogues have significantly augmented our understanding of the interplay

between social, economic, environmental, and psychological forces that effected

individual craftsmen and consumers in specific towns and regions. In many cases,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. however, authors seem reluctant to draw comparisons or situate the artisans and objects

that they studied in a broader context. As a result, their discoveries and insights do not

contribute to a greater synthetic understanding of material culture. Knowing how

craftsmen in one city constructed their desks, for instance, means little until compared to

desks from other cities. Without context, the regional differences between furniture

pieces have limited impact on the study of American cultural history.

Furniture scholars have emphasized difference rather than similarity because their

inquiries favor artistry over social history. They have delighted in the satisfaction of

solving the puzzles embedded in unidentified furniture. In addition, somewhat

nationalistic objectives underlay much of mid-twentieth-century scholarship that

endeavored to define a specifically “American” aesthetic and identify which design

innovations developed on this side of the Atlantic.3 Often, the ultimate goal has been to

develop surefire ways to attribute a specific piece to a geographic origin. An exemplary

model of this approach is The Work o f Many Hands, a catalog and exhibition that resulted

from the many-year project of psychologist and collector Benjamin A. Hewitt.6 Using

every Federal-era card table with a confidently documented place of manufacture, Hewitt

meticulously calculated measurements and construction data to generate regional

“norms” from which he could confidently determine a card table’s regional origin. He

successfully transcended regionalism by using tables from throughout the early United

States to provide a useful methodological tool that significantly augmented our

knowledge about Federal-era card tables. Ultimately, however, attributing an origin to a

piece of furniture may contribute more to the elevation of its price tag on the antiques

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. market than to our understanding of everyday life in early America.

This study differs conceptually from Hewitt’s study and most other conventional

furniture scholarship. Rather than looking for ways to determine a table’s origin, this

study searches for the meaning of tilt-top tables from all origins. It does not seek to

attribute specific tilt-top tables to specific cabinetmaking shops or uncover long-lost

diaries that narrate a young bride’s purchase of a tilt-top table for her new parlor. Rather,

it seeks to explain the cultural meaning of the simultaneous appearance of similar tilt-top

tables throughout the North Atlantic British colonies in the mid-eighteenth century.

While it remains important to pursue regional studies of American furniture, the means

should not obscure the end. We study furniture to learn about people, and unless we

attempt to extract larger meanings from our discoveries, we will leam only about

furniture.

The tilt-top table was an appropriate candidate for this type of synthetic study for

two reasons: first, because tripod tables with flip tops differ structurally from traditional

rectangular framed tables, and their proliferation through a broad cross-section of the

American population at a particular moment in time suggests important cultural changes

among both producers and consumers; second, because collectors, curators, and scholars

over the years have gathered a significant body of information regarding the construction,

purchase, use, and history of tilt-top tables. In other words, the evidence base already

exists. Along with the physical evidence of the tables themselves, this body of

information framed my “generalizing theories.”7

Of course, thousands of American tilt-top tables survive in museums and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. collections around the country and no scholar can hope to examine them all. I considered

limiting this study to tilt-top tables with known origins, but I did not for several reasons.

First, despite the significant number of tilt-top tables with documented histories, most of

them survive from Pennsylvania and the middle colonies, too limited a geographical

range from which to document the proliferation of tilt-top tables throughout the Anglo-

American settlements. Second, the tilt-top tables with known histories generally

belonged to wealthy families and were more elaborately decorated than the majority that

existed in the eighteenth century. Studying only documented tables would have excluded

the many plain versions made of maple or undecorated walnut that carried cultural

meaning for the less wealthy. Therefore, in order to include tilt-top tables owned by a

larger cross-section of the population, I studied both documented and undocumented

tables, nearly 100 of which I examined first-hand. I surveyed 200 more through

photographs and catalogue entries. I concentrated on tables with circular tops,

considering those with square, octagonal, or oblong tops only for comparison. I excluded

tilt-top tables made after 1790 when the new political and economic conditions in the

United States changed the way people designed, chose, and used these tables.

Seeing Similarity Rather than Difference

Moving beyond the cataloguing of differences to recognize the similarities among

tilt-top tables made in different regions of British North America highlights their

widespread appearance as a new kind of table. The similarities are best understood

visually. Figures 2-10 juxtapose tables and table parts to illustrate that within a fifty-year

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. period, people hundreds of miles from each other made a new type of table constructed in

essentially the same way with essentially the same features. These figures do not

represent every version of tilt-top tables made and used. Nor do they suggest that the

tables pictured are identical. Rather, by grouping similar tilt-top tables from different

regions instead of focusing on those made in one particular region, the figures take us

beyond the details of construction or decoration and illustrate the geographic

pervasiveness of a new furniture form. This shift in perspective forces us to consider the

meaning of similarity not just difference.

Craftsmen constructed tilt-top tables from three groups of component parts: legs,

pillars, and tops. They commonly made tops in three distinct types: plain with smoothed

edges (fig. 2), dished with molded edges (fig. 3), and shaped into carved and molded

scalloped edges (fig. 4). Molding shapes around the dished tops varied but generally they

matched molding profiles used on furniture and architecture. Usually the moldings rose

from the plane of the table top and faced inward (in-tumed molding), but sometimes they

descended from it and faced outward serving more as decoration than as a functional lip

to contain ceramics and silver (descending molding). Scalloped patterns derived from

various combinations of cyma-curves and flat segments that usually repeated in eight

segments, but sometimes as few as four or as many as ten or twelve.

For turning pillars, craftsmen in different areas of the colonies often used the

same shapes. Baluster-shaped pillars were perhaps the most geographically ubiquitous

(fig. 5). Some balusters were subtle attenuated swellings while others were bold bulbs.

Also common throughout the colonies were plain column pillars with fillet moldings on

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Charleston Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1990-43

New York Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Decorative Arts Photographic Collection, Winterthur Museum, 1971.396

Pennsylvania Maple, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont 1956.38.90.

Connecticut Black cherry, detail

Courtesy, Vale University Art Gallery, 1930.2458

Massachusetts Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont 1952.21

Figure 2. Plain tops.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Virginia Walnut detail

Courtesy, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988-361

Pennsylvania Maple, detail Descending molding

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1958.1460

Pennsylvania Mahogany, detail In-turned molding

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of H. Rodney Sharp, 1958.3228

Newport Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1959.2648

Massachusetts Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1959.2317

Figure 3. Dished tops.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Charleston Mahogany, detail

Collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 2181

Philadelphia Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1960.1061

New York Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1959.2928

New York Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1965.2904

Connecticut Cherry, detail

Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, Layton Collection, L1974.205

Figure 4. Scalloped tops.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Virginia Delaware Pennsylvania New York Connecticut Walnut, detail Mahogany, detail Maple, detail Mahogany, detail Cherry, detail

Courtesy, Courtesy, Courtesy, Courtesy, Courtesy, Yale Museum of Winterthur Winterthur Decorative Arts University Art Early Southern Museum, gift of Museum, gift of Photographic Gallery, 1930. Decorative Arts, Henry Francis du Henry Francis du Collection, 2458 3-6980 Pont, 1993.107 Pont, 1958.1461 Winterhur Museum, 71.396

Figure 5. Baluster pillars.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. top and bottom or spool turnings at the base (fig. 6). Often, column pillars both plain and

fluted sat atop other shapes like compressed balls, spiral fluted urns (fig. 7), inverted

cups, and squat balusters, which were often carved (fig. 8).

Tripod legs—the third component part—appeared on tilt-top tables in all regions

of the colonies. Some had dramatic cabriole shapes with high-arched shoulders (fig. 9).

Others were shallow curves sloping down to the feet (fig. 10). The edges of some were

smoothed until almost round, others were left sharp creating angular rectilinear legs.

Some historians have suggested that cabriole shapes evolved throughout the eighteenth

century, reaching their most expressive stage in the 1760s.8 Many varied cabriole shapes,

however, were made simultaneously between 1740 and 1790 as demonstrated in Figures

9 and 10.

Craftsmen throughout the American colonies made tilt-top tables in various sizes.

Figure 11 presents the ranges between the smallest and largest sizes known for three

important measurements: the overall height, the diameter of the top, and the width of the

tripod. Their heights correspond to the average heights of other tables in this era. The

actual height o f some tilt-top tables, however, would have been slightly greater than at

present since they had casters in the eighteenth century that were removed in later years.9

The diameters of the tops sometimes determined the nomenclature applied. Most

tabletops fell between twenty-eight and thirty-six inches, but those with tops between

eighteen and twenty-two inches were often called candlestands. Despite the different

name, candlestands were probably used for eating, working, and drinking—just like

larger tilt-top table—as well as for holding candlesticks. Tripod widths, the distance

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Eastern Virginia Philadelphia Newport M assachu Black walnut Mahogany Mahogany se tts detail detail detail Mahogany detail Courtesy, Colonial Courtesy, Courtesy, Williamsburg Philadelphia Estate Antiques, Courtesy, Foundation, Museum of Art: Inc. Winterthur 1988-361 Purchased with the Museum, gift of Haas Community Henry Francis Fund and the Stog- du Pont, dell Stokes Fund, 1958.2773 1968-174-1

Figure 6. Plain column pillars.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Massachusetts Massachusetts Newport Norfolk Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail Walnut detail

Courtesy, Courtesy, Courtesy, The John Courtesy, Colonial Winterthur Winterthur Nicholas Brown Williamsburg Museum, gift of Museum, gift of Center for the Foundation, Henry Francis du Henry Francis du Study of American 1983-23 Pont, 1952.21 Pont, 1959.2317 Civilization

Figure 7. Plain column pillars with spiral fluted urns.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Charleston Philadelphia New York New York Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Estate Courtesy, Winterthur Courtesy, Winterthur Courtesy, Antiques, inc. Museum, gift of Museum, gift of The Chipstone Henry Francis du Henry Francis du Foundation, Pont, 1958.2215 Pont, 1957.513 1968.1

Figure 8. Plain column pillars with squat balusters, some of them carved.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Charleston Philadelphia Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1952.259 Francis du Pont, 1958.2264

New York Massachusetts Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, The Chipstone Foundation, 1956.12 Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1958.2773

Figure 9. Legs with high-arched shoulders.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Virginia New York Walnut, detail Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Museum of Early Southern Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Decorative Arts, S-6980 Francis du Pont, 1965.2904

Newport Massachusetts or Rhode Island Mahogany, detail Mahogany, detail

Courtesy, Estate Antiques, Inc. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1964.984

Figure 10. Legs with shallow-sloped shoulders.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Range of Overall Height most common height

25 27 29 30

Range of Tabletop Diameters

often called candlestands most common diameter

18 22 28 36 40

Range of Tripod Widths most common tripod widthon tables most common tripod width on tables with tops of diameter 20-22 inches with tops of diameter 36-40 inches

20 22 26 29 30

Fig. 11. Ranges of tilt-top table sizes. All numbers are in inches.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from toe to toe between adjacent legs, varied depending on the diameter of the top but

generally fell within one of two size ranges.

While Figures 2-11 demonstrate the formal similarities between many tables, they

have one inherent problem. They include tables without documented histories that

usually have been attributed to particular regions based on their decorative features

according to the taxonomies that I have criticized. Despite the conjectural nature of these

attributions, I used these regional origins to demonstrate that tables made throughout the

colonies shared similar features. Given more time, I could find more documented tables

and begin to develop a more reliable system for identifying tables by region. For the time

being, I must acknowledge the speculative nature of the regional attributions.

Simultaneously, I also must emphasize that knowing the regional origin of a table does

not change its basic function. Tables from different cities—even if they had different

pillar shapes or scallop patterns— functioned the same way and carried similar cultural

meaning for those who made and used them.

The similarities between tilt-top tables made in distant regions can be explained

by trends in craft practices and the migration patterns of cabinetmakers that historians

already recognize. The eighteenth century was an era of significant movement. Groups

of people came from Europe in search of ideological or religious refuge. Individuals

traveled from town to town seeking profitable endeavors. And whole communities

transplanted themselves and their cultures. Amid this flurry of traffic, tilt-top tables came

to America from England in the minds and memories of immigrant craftsmen. While

ships unloaded immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, German-speaking

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. regions, France, and Holland, the largest numbers of people in this era came from

England. While London’s most prestigious cabinetmaking shops had made tilt-top tables

fashionable among the elite, many of the smaller shops had made them available to less

wealthy customers. When craftsmen, many of whom had trained in smaller London

shops, arrived in America, they continued making the tables that were familiar to them

and their Anglo-centric American customers. Plain versions of American and English

tilt-top tables were so familiar, in fact, that many today are indistinguishable because

craftsmen on both sides of the Atlantic regularly made them entirely of mahogany

imported from the same regions of the West Indies.

Craftsmen brought many specific features and decorative motifs common on

London tables to different American cities. For example, tilt-top table pillars with spiral

fluted urns survive on tables made in Eastern Massachusetts, Newport, Rhode Island and

Norfolk, Virginia (see fig. 7). Jonathan Prown and Ronald L. Hurst have suggested that

the motif crossed the ocean with London-trained craftsmen who frequently turned spiral

fluted urns on pillars for beds and stands, as well as for tilt-top tables.10 Newport

absorbed large numbers of English immigrants after the Seven Years War ended in 1763,

and Norfolk was a growing city where the majority of craftsmen either trained in England

or with an English master.11 Craftsmen migrating to these cities (and probably others)

were accustomed to making spiral fluted urns and continued to do so in their new homes.

In this way, the same features appeared on tilt-top tables made in different American

regions.12

Not only did the tilt-top table idea travel to and within the colonies in the minds

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Zimmerman has called the “workmanship of habit.” Professional craftsmen at their

lathes repeatedly turned the same patterns of shapes. They did not use templates to

control their chisels and gouges but became so accustomed to memorized patterns that

they developed “templates of action.” In other words, their practiced hand skills ensured

significant regularity in their products. By turning the same shapes repeatedly based on

their workmanship of habit, craftsmen could increase productivity. When one craftsman

in one town developed a “template of action” for a particular tilt-top table pillar shape,

multiple tables in that town displayed his pillar shape. In many cases, apprentices

inherited the “templates of action” from their masters who trained them, thus

perpetuating the appearance of a particular turned shape in one town over two or more

generations. Craftsmen in other towns, however, developed “templates of action” for

different shapes. As a result, the table pillars in one town may have matched, but they

may have differed considerably from table pillars in another town. This and other oft-

cited differences between tables in different regions find a historical explanation in

Zimmerman’s argument.18

Tilt-top Tables and the 1740s

Having recognized that both the similarities and differences between tilt-top

tables made up and down the American Atlantic coast already have historical

explanations, we can progress to deeper questions: Why did people start making a new

type of table in the 1740s? Why central-pedestal tripod tables with tilt-tops? As we shall

see, the combination of favorable economic circumstances, the spread of the refined

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lifestyle from the European aristocratic courts to people of lesser status, and increased

demand and supply of relatively inexpensive consumer objects that fueled a rise in

consumerism all contributed to the wide manufacture and consumption of tilt-top tables.

In England, tripod pedestal stands had been used since the mid-seventeenth

century to support candles. By 1710, high-end London cabinetmakers were making four-

foot-tall tripod candlestands with circular tops and heavily decorated central pedestals to

illuminate and complement the decor of grand ballrooms.19 Between 1710 and 1720,

they shortened the tripod pedestals and added circular table-sized tops.20 They called

them “pillar and claw” tables, the “claw” being the three feet. Other English terms

included “claw table” and “snap table,” an onomatopoetic name inspired by the brass

catch that held the top in a horizontal position.21 While pillar and claw pedestals

supported numerous types of tops intended for various purposes, many were intended for

tea drinking. Like rectangular tea tables, which were developed in the 1680s and

proliferated in the following decades, many English pillar and claw tea tables had pierced

or perforated galleries to keep the expensive porcelain or silver from falling off the edge.

Others were scalloped and carved with elaborate foliate or cyma-curves.22

Tea drinking had become widespread in England by the second quarter of the

eighteenth century. Of all the exotic beverages that had become popular in the

seventeenth century, starting with chocolate and coffee, tea became most popular in the

eighteenth century because the price dropped within reach of a great many people. Large

outdoor public venues like Vauxhall Gardens, which opened in 1732 with brilliant

illumination and a general atmosphere of “social intoxication,” indoctrinated the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. middling sort to the conviviality of tea drinking. Even modest homes soon had tables

bought specifically for making and serving tea in social gatherings. To fulfill that

demand, cabinetmakers made less elaborate pillar and claw tables to sell to the middle

sort—precisely the people traveling to America.23

People in America owned tilt-top tables by 1740, when English terms for tilt-top

tables begin appearing in documentary records. The inventory of a Charleston man

records his owning “One round mahogany claw foot table” at his death in 1740,

suggesting that his tilt-top table probably existed before that year. Philadelphia

cabinetmakers Joseph Hall and Henry Rigby advertised for sale in January 1745 a “Pillar

and Claw table” and also “An old Pillar & Claw Mahogy Table,” whose qualifier

suggests that it was made before the given date. Some colonists did not use English

terms to describe this new form. Probate officials in Wethersfield, Connecticut described

John Calder’s table as having a “fashion swivel leaf,” in 1749. In 1757, Peter Minot, a

Boston merchant, died leaving a “Mahogany Turn up Table.” Quickly, craftsmen and

retailers began calling them “tea tables.” A rigger in Portsmouth, New Hampshire died

leaving a “3 leg’d Tea Table” in 1755. And beginning in the 1740s, merchants bought

newspaper advertisements boasting iron and brass “tea table ketches.” referring to the

catches and catch plates.24

No known American tables survive with reliable histories proving a manufacture

date prior to 1740. In Worldly Goods, however, Jack Lindsey attached very early dates to

two tables. He suggested that one was made as early as 1715 based on its turning pattern

and the similarity of its pseudo-triangular platform base that connected the pillar and the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. legs to seventeenth-century English candlestands. His assertion seems tenuous,

especially since tables with pseudo-triangular platform bases appeared periodically in

other colonies over many decades, most frequently in Newport in the 1760s. His

suggestion that a second table was made between 1730-35 is possible, but is based only

on an undocumented family history.23 The earliest extant table with a relatively certain

manufacture date has William Savery’s label and may have been made soon after his

apprenticeship ended in Philadelphia in 1741, but most likely sometime within a decade

after 1745 (fig. 12). Also, a table that descended in the Wharton family of Philadelphia

has been catalogued as having been made between 1748 and 1755.26 Overall, the

documentary and physical evidence suggests that craftsmen in America began making

tilt-top tables around 1740.

Life in the British North American colonies wras changing in the 1740s.

Economic historians John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard have demonstrated that

the colonial economy grew in two spurts. The first directly followed initial settlement in

the seventeenth century. The second spurt began in the 1740s and continued until the

Revolution. During that time, trade boomed due to increased demand for American

products among merchants and consumers in London. More and more people became

involved in harvesting, transporting, and selling foodstuffs and raw materials from the

colonies to Europe. As commercial activity grew, so did revenue. McCusker and

Menard explained, “the prices for American staples rose more rapidly than those for

British manufactures” causing the terms of trade to shift favorably toward colonial

merchants. While per capita income data does not exist, population increase can estimate

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 12. Tilt-top table with earliest documented manufacture date. William Savery (labeled), Philadelphia, mahogany, 1741-55. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Haas Community Fund and the Stogdell Stokes Fund, 1968-174-1.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. economic growth assuming that more people meant more production, consumption, and

income. Between 1700 and 1750, the number of white British North Americans (not

including the West Indies) grew more than fourfold, from 234,000 to 964,000. In other

words, after almost a century of “stagnation,” the colonial economy began offering

people more opportunity for financial gain than the English economy.2'

The economic growth of the 1740s coincided with the larger evolution of

consumerism and refinement. Historians have demonstrated that demand for objects

previously considered luxuries proliferated among non-elite English and Americans

beginning around 1690. With the Enlightenment and a growing capitalist market

encouraging individuals to strive for personal success by economic as well as social

measure, household objects began figuring more prominently in their strategies to

achieve and demonstrate that success. Rather than judging a man by the number of his

fields or the size of his bam, people began judging him based on his personal deportment

at prescription balls, the number and arrangement of glazed windows in his house, and

the arrangement of matching chairs around the perimeter of his central hallway. As

refinement became a common form of social exchange, people demanded more consumer

goods. The consumer goods available for purchase, however, were not necessarily new.

Chinese porcelain, Asian and Middle-Eastern textiles, European ceramics, and spices had

been in America since the first European settlements. The quantity, however, rose

dramatically.28

People whose access to these goods had previously been limited by lack of wealth

and restrictive sumptuary laws became consumers as supply rose and prices fell. By the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1740s, refinement and consumerism had raised the standards of living for many

Americans.29 In recent years, scholars have demonstrated that refinement moved quickly

from the gentry class into the middle ranks of society. By developing an “amenities

index” to measure changes in the standard of living recorded in the probate inventories

for the Chesapeake region, Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh have determined that a

significant number of merchants, artisans, and planters chose to reorient their lifestyles

toward refinement. “The trappings of gentility began to penetrate the households of

middling planters as they aspired to achieve gentle status, and such items as tea had even

reached the households of the poor.” Gloria L. Main conducted a similar study of rural

Massachusetts and Connecticut and discovered that a “major change did take place

during the eighteenth century” among ordinary people, “in their style of life as well as

their standard of living.” Demand for genteel environments grew as people of moderate

means strove toward a refined way of living, and favorable economic conditions made

supplying their demand both possible and profitable."0

Tilt-top tables were among the many goods that circulated in this growing

economy. To understand how they functioned as commodities, we can explore the key

players driving their production and proliferation, namely those who made, bought, and

used them. Ann Smart Martin outlined this theoretical approach in her 1993 article

“Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework.” She

defined consumerism as “the cultural relationship between humans and consumer goods

and services, including behaviors, institutions, and ideas.” Studying consumerism, she

argued, illuminates the lives of the disenfranchised as traditional history does not, an

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. endeavor espoused by Marxist scholars and members of the Annales school including

Fernand Braudel.31

To explore their function as commodities, I will discuss tilt-top tables according

to Martin’s framework, but with one amendment. To her list of key players—makers,

buyers, and users— I will add distributors. As we will see, the person making the table

may not have been the person selling it. In the quickly growing eighteenth century

economy, the people who profited most dramatically were often the people who shipped

goods from one city to another, buying goods from the makers, running warehouses, and

supplying the retailers. By exploring the identity of tilt-top tables as commodities, by

focusing on their relationships with people, I hope to remove the antiquarian patina of the

“piecrust tea table” and begin to understand how this new furniture form indicated

fluctuations in the North Atlantic consumer economy.

Makers

The following investigation of the artisans who made tilt-top tables can be divided

into two sections. The first section describes in detail how individual craftsmen made

each table part and assembled the final product. The second section explores the

interactions between craftsmen and their relationship to the larger Atlantic World. First

and foremost, craftsmen strove to construct and sell their products profitably. Whether a

specialized turner in the highly competitive Philadelphia market or a rural Massachusetts

joiner trying to replicate the tilt-top table he saw last year in Boston, every craftsman

tried to make tables and stands that would appeal to their consumers and provide income.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Studying tilt-top table production and design indicates that craftsmen used the tools and

skills available to them to make the most desirable tables they could as quickly as they

could.

The basic construction steps can be divided into three broad tasks: turning the

pillar and top, shaping the legs, and assembling. To turn the central pillar and the small

pillars in the box, the craftsman required either a foot-powered pole lathe or an

apprentice-powered great wheel lathe. Steadying his chisel or gouge by holding the long

handle under his arm, he removed wood from the rotating rough blank to make shapes.

The workmanship of habit kept him from belaboring over the details of the shape of each

pillar he turned. Some craftsmen increased their efficiency by making similar shapes on

pillars for tilt-top tables as on pillars for other projects. Baluster pillars, for instance, may

have been popular in so many cities and towns because o f their ubiquity in architectural

design in the mid-eighteenth century. Architectural traditions from all over Europe

incorporated baluster-shaped elements in both domestic and civic structures making it

one of the most frequently turned forms among craftsmen in America. Every turner

probably learned to make balusters by eye and made them for railings and balustrades, as

well as models for molds used in brass, pewter, and silver casting.

At least two baluster-shaped tilt-top table pillars have been connected to

craftsmen also involved in architectural construction. In 1787 in Windsor, Connecticut,

Thomas Hayden rendered a cross-section drawing of a baluster-and-ring pillar for a tilt-

top table on the same page as plans for architectural comice moldings. William Hosley

and Philip Zea have attributed one table to him with a pillar identical to his drawing, and

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tops (fig. 13). The larger the top the wider the ball. Often turners included annular rings,

either incised or projecting, around the center of the compressed balls to further

emphasize their horizontality.Jb As more and more refined household objects proliferated

throughout the colonies, craftsmen developed increasingly sophisticated design aesthetics

that appeared in their tables.

Turning circular tabletops required a special tool that rotated a plank of wood in a

vertical plane. Evidence regarding this practice is scant. No seventeenth or eighteenth

century encyclopedias include illustrations of mechanisms that allowed lathes to turn

wood in this way. But in 1796, the Dominy family of cabinetmakers in East Hampton,

Long Island acquired an “Arbor & Cross for Turning Stands,” which survives at the

Winterthur Museum. It has an iron cross, on to which the craftsman screwed the plank to

be turned, and an iron rod which pierced a wooden puppet, allowing the craftsman to

attach the cross to a lathe. The Dominys used their arbor and cross mechanism with their

great wheel lathe because their pole lathe would not have generated enough power or

rotated the board for a full rotation.37 While only the Dominys’ arbor and cross

mechanism survives, evidence in extant tables indicates that many craftsmen in colonial

America used them to turn tilt-top tabletops. Some tops have four holes in the undersides

measuring equal distances from the center point and from each other, evidence of having

been screwed to a cross.38 Even tops without the four telltale holes were probably turned

with an arbor and cross. A craftsman could have hidden the holes under the block or box,

or some may have avoided screwing holes into their table top by screwing the cross into a

piece of pine or other scrap wood that they glued to the turning blank.39 A craftsman

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 13. Proportion of turned shapes. Table (a) has a relatively spherical ball in its pillar (c), while Table (b) has a compressed ball (d) whose greater width visually compensates for its larger top. Table (a), walnut, Philadelphia, 1740-75, courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1958.2264; Table (b), mahogany, Philadelphia. 1760-80, courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1958.3328.

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35-36

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 15. Block with a square tenon from the pillar. Also note the rounded end of the block on the left side where the pintels fit into the cleats, and the brass catch plate on the right. Mahogany, New York, 1765-75. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift o f Henry Francis du Pont. 1957.513.

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38-44

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. craftsman’s investment because it allowed him to use the same templates or even the

same leg blanks as he used for plain feet, but it also allowed him to offer tilt-top tables at

varying levels of decoration to a wider group of customers. It required little investment

on his part but fetched significant pay-back from the customers.

Just as these cabinetmakers added relief carving to plain feet, some cabinetmakers

added relief carving to plain smoothed legs. The legs on a surviving New York-made

table have low-relief C-scrolls carved into the vertical sides of the legs (fig. 21).46

Because the face of the C-scrolls are on the same plane as the top edges of the knees, it is

clear that the C-scroll was defined by relieving the area immediately around it and

smoothing the surrounding surfaces to create the illusion of a projecting C-scroll. This

craftsman or his customers may have seen the elaborately carved under-knee C-scrolls

that defined the shapes of the legs on some high-style tables made in cities including

London, Philadelphia and New York (fig. 22).47 By adding relief carving to a leg that he

made with the same templates that he used to make plain legs, this craftsman created a

much cheaper, albeit less visually striking, version of a very expensive decorative motif.

This case again illustrates that craftsmen found quick ways to make tables with different

decorative elements affordable to moderately monied customers.

The varied quality and design of carving on the legs also indicates that craftsmen

made tables at different levels of elaboration. The quickest and cheapest carved motifs

remained within the confines of the shape of the leg. For this reason, acanthus leaves

appeared frequently because their generally straight lines can easily follow the grain,

reducing the risk of chipping (fig. 23a). They also follow the edges of the leg making

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 21. Low-relief C-scroll carved into the vertical side o f the leg. Mahogany, New York. 1765-75. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift o f Henry Francis du Pont, 1957.513.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 22. High-relief C-scroll. The carver who made the low-relief C-scroll in the leg in Figure 2 1 may have been imitating the elaborately decorated C-scroll carved in this leg. Mahogany, Philadelphia, c. 1769, Gratz family provenance, detail, from Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 312-3.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 23. Knee carving. Knee (a) demonstrates simple acanthus leaf carving that remains within the confines of the leg. Knees (b) and (d) display more advanced carving with leaves that tumble over the sides of the legs. Knee (c) displays a cabochon. All images are details, courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1952.259, 1952.21, 1958.2215, 1959.3404.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. design and execution relatively simple. Even inexperienced carvers would have been

familiar with acanthus leaf motifs, having carved them or at least seen them on countless

other forms including knees on chairs and rectangular tables as well as architectural

elements like volute brackets. A more skilled carver, however, might have made

acanthus leaves whose tips tumbled over the edge onto the sides of the legs probably

making his work more expensive (fig. 23b and d).48 Other motifs on knees including

cabochons and intertwining tendrils and sprigs may have been more difficult to carve,

requiring cross-grain work that raised the risk of loss (fig. 23c). Such complex carved

patterns, however, were generally restricted to urban areas where markets could support

professional carvers.

To finish the final step in tilt-top table production—assembly—the craftsman

sawed dovetails and corresponding holes in the bottom of the pillar. Many craftsmen

relieved the bottom end of the pillar creating a very small lip that rested on the top edge

of the legs and distributed a small portion of the weight of the table to the tops of the legs,

sparing the inherently weak dovetail joint (fig. 24). To further strengthen the joint,

craftsmen often acquired three-pronged iron braces from local blacksmiths and nailed

them to the undersides of the pillar and legs (fig. 25). It is possible that some customers

had the braces applied after purchasing the tables to repair specific breaks or guard

against the inevitable. Overall, craftsmen turning tops and pillars, shaping legs, adding

decoration, and assembling the parts constantly balanced their skills and their time to

offer their customers a variety of choices.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 24. Weight distribution. Many craftsmen relieved a small lip in the base of the pillar through which some of the weight o f the table was transferred to the tops of the legs. Walnut, Eastern Virginia, 1755-80, detail. Courtesy, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, G 1988-361.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 25. Iron brace underneath the pillar and legs. Most braces are attached with nails rather than screws. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1952.21.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The following second section investigating the makers recognizes that, in many

cases, more than one craftsman performed the three broad tasks involved in tilt-top table

construction. Historians have long suggested this, but have not explored the details or the

significance. As early as 1935, William McPherson Homor, Jr. wrote of Philadelphia

tables that the “component parts could be purchased by cabinet-makers ready to

assemble, or the wood was sent to turners, who, upon specification, shaped the pillars and

colonnettes and rounded the boards.” In his 1978 study of Thomas Chippendale,

Christopher Gilbert demonstrated that urban London cabinetmaking shops built pillar and

claw tables from component parts often procured from specialized craftsmen. In 1985,

Morrison H. Heckscher suggested that shops in Philadelphia and New York followed the

same practice. And in 1997, Nancy Goyne Evans and Nancy E. Richards finally called

the production of tilt-top tables a “collaborative effort.”49

Such collaboration developed as more craftsmen specialized their production in

order to make their jobs easier, reduce their costs, improve their products, and raise their

profits. The expanding economy allowed many artisans to focus on turning, carving and

gilding, or the construction and marketing of particular forms like tables or desks.

Turners and carvers—the specialists most often involved in tilt-top table production—

probably began appearing in greater numbers in American cities beginning in the

1730s.50 Some came from London, like the unnamed turner who advertised “all Sorts of

Turning in Hard Wood, as Coffee-Mills, Pepper Boxes, Punch Bowls, Mortors, [and]

Sugar Boxes” in The Pennsylvania Gazette late in 1732. Similarly, Thomas Woodin

advertised in the South Carolina Gazette in 1735 and 1736 that he was a “carver,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. formerly of London.” Many specialists moved from one American city to another

seeking the most profitable markets. In 1767, John Briggard advertised in the South

Carolina Gazette and County Advertiser that he had “lately arrived from Philadelphia,”

and “opened a Turner’s Shop on the Bay.”51

Specialists sold component tilt-top table parts to other craftsmen. In 1754, Joshua

Delaplaine, a New York cabinetmaker, recorded buying “2 pillers of Mahogany” and a

third one the next day from John Paston. Joseph Pattison, “Turner from London,”

advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1751 that he “turned in the best manner, and

with dispatch... tea table tops, and tea boards, pillars, balusters....” He directed his

advertisement directly to other craftsmen interested in his wares. Similarly, carvers

advertised their skills. A specialist named Minshall advertised in New York in 1769 that

he carved “candle stands... tables, chairs, et al... in the present mode.” Thomas Elfe, a

cabinetmaker in Charleston, worked with many specialists including Thomas Burnham

whom he paid in November 1771 “for Carving a Pillar and Claws.” He often bought

turned parts from William Wayne over several years. In September 1771, he paid Wayne

£1.10.0 for "2 tea table pillars & turning [them].”52

Some artisans traded tilt-top table parts across considerable distances. On June

10, 1784, Solomon Lathrop, a joiner in Springfield, Massachusetts, recorded “carrying 8

tea table pillars to Windsor,” about 15 miles away, where either a buyer was waiting or

where he knew he could sell them profitably to other craftsmen. Possibly, he shipped

them down the Connecticut River. Indeed, the exchange of tilt-top table parts between

craftsmen in different colonies or regions may have been considerable. Samuel Williams

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. advertised in The Pennsylvania Gazette that in addition to selling “mahogany and walnut

tea table columns,” he also sold “mahogany tea table tops” ready for use or “exportation.”

These may be the first recorded instances of furniture parts being traded on the market.

Just like merchants who sold lumber, tools, or brass hardware to artisans, craftsmen

offered tilt-top table parts as commodities to fellow artisans. Not only does this

challenge the collectors’ notions that furniture pieces originated in one place made by one

hand, it signals a first step toward industrial production.33

As the cases of Solomon Lathrop and Samuel Williams illustrate, craftsmen and

merchants in both urban and rural areas exchanged parts and skills. The only difference

between rural and urban exchanges may have been volume. Universally, each man’s

training, aptitude, and tools determined which items he could make quickly enough to

sustain a business. The determining factor influencing the degree of his specialization

was the size of his market. Demand was most concentrated in urban areas. Therefore, a

craftsman in a less populated rural area where a smaller market exerted less pressure on

him to specialize may have been more likely to make all three component parts of tilt-top

tables himself. Obtaining or building a lathe and beginning to turn, however, was

probably the first step that a rural craftsman took when he began to specialize.54 This

suggests that while rural craftsmen may not have traded component parts on the same

scale as urban merchants, tilt-top table tops and pillars may have been among the first

products that they exchanged.55

It is possible that craftsmen making large numbers of tilt-top tables kept

component parts on hand in their shops to be assembled on short notice. They may have

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. modeled this practice on large shops in London that produced in great volume and often

stockpiled parts. For instance, when London carver, cabinetmaker, and upholsterer

William Linnell died in 1763, he left “38 setts of claws for pillar and claw tables” and “4

setts of carved table claws Do.”56 Craftsmen in the colonies produced on a smaller scale

making stockpiling less economically feasible. Some, however, were able to keep parts

on hand. Joshua Moore, a joiner in Philadelphia, died in 1778 leaving “ 13 tea table

pillars” and “ 1 Tea Table top.”57

Specialized craftsmen involved in tilt-top table production may have based their

systems of collaborative exchange on the chair industry that had developed in previous

decades. In his groundbreaking study, American Seating Furniture, 1630-1730, which

ably demonstrates the strides in social history that can result from pairing intense object

study with cultural context, Benno Forman uncovered the proto-industrial nature of chair-

making in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Beginning in the 1680s in

London, new craftsmen called “chairmakers” began coordinating specialized artisans in

the manufacture of cane chairs. They jobbed out stiles, front legs, and stretchers to

turners; crest rails and often front stretchers to carvers; and for the seats, they hired

caners, and later upholsterers as Russia leather became a popular finishing material.

Recognizing the popularity of imported English cane chairs in America, craftsmen in

Boston replicated cane and leather chair production, probably by 1696. Forman pointed

out that dividing labor in this way benefited both maker and buyer. Master craftsmen did

not have to pay wages to specialist journeymen in their shops. Competition among the

subcontractors lowered the prices for their services, and this lowered the ultimate prices

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the chairs, which benefited consumers. Chairmakers appeared in New York and

Philadelphia also, but over the next decades Boston craftsmen dominated the market and

exported large numbers of standardized leather upholstered chairs to British colonial

cities as far north as Newfoundland and as far south as the West Indies.38

Craftsmen had stopped producing the so-called “Boston chairs” by the 1740s,

around the same time that craftsmen began making tilt-top tables. This correlation

suggests that the specialization and collaboration pioneered in the chair industry probably

informed tilt-top table production. The success of the chair makers had demonstrated the

financial benefits of specialization and collaboration. It was a good production model.

Whether trained in chair-making or just hoping to mimic its success, craftsmen planning

to make tilt-top tables probably established commercial relationships with specialists

based on the strategy forged in the chair industry. The catalyst for this shift was

consumer demand. By the 1740s, enough people wanted fashionable tables to encourage

craftsmen to devise ways to produce them efficiently and sell them affordably. The chair

industry provided a proven production strategy for making furniture in volume for the

middle range market. And, as we will see, because of their turned parts and relatively

simple assembly, tilt-top tables could be easily adapted into the chair makers’ model.

William Savery, whose labeled table was identified above as the earliest

documented extant tilt-top table, is an example of a chairmaker who began producing tilt-

top tables. He apprenticed with Solomon Fussell in Philadelphia whose surviving

account book documents a large-scale shop producing chairs to compete with those being

shipped from Boston. Fussell made both joined and turned chairs and bought seat lists

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and slats from specialists outside his shop. By the end of his apprenticeship in 1741,

Savery knew how to assemble and sell chairs by maintaining business relationships with

other craftsmen. Even though he continued to work at the “Sign of the Chair” as his

labels indicate, he broadened his market by adding other forms to his repertoire including

case furniture. Tilt-top tables, however, may have been one of his first ventures away

from seating forms. He may have acquired the component parts through the same

channels through which he acquired chair parts, since making pillars and tops required

similar tools and skills as making lists and stiles for slat-back chairs and stretchers for

joined chairs. Acquiring the hardware would have been especially easy since, Fussell, his

former master, advertised “brass tea table catches” for sale in The Pennsylvania

G azetted

Other chairmakers may have followed Savery’s trajectory into tilt-top table

making. As new-fashioned chairs with cabriole legs began supplanting chairs with

turned legs and stiles in the 1730s, Savery and many other craftsmen employed in the

chair industry had to find new products to make on their lathes. Many may have

redirected their turning skills from making chair parts to making tilt-top table parts. They

could have continued to work with familiar joiners and carvers (though not upholsterers),

maintaining their commercial relationships exchanging tops and pillars instead of stiles

and legs. One Connecticut table made of black cherry has a label that reads “Theodosius

Parsons / CHAER-MAKER and JOINER / WINDHAM.”60 While little is known about

Parsons, he worked in the late 1780s, suggesting that the link between chair-making and

tilt-top table making persisted for at least several decades.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The correlation between the production strategies used in making chairs and tilt-

top tables can be bolstered by examining the Windsor chair industry. Nancy Goyne

Evans has demonstrated that colonists began importing English Windsor chairs in the

1730s, and began making them in the following decade. The rise of this second industry

based on turning in the 1740s further supports the proposition that turners formerly

employed in the cane and leather chair industry were redirecting their skills into new

products. Perhaps those who had been firmly entrenched in making Boston chairs felt

most confident making Windsors, while other turners chose to make tilt-top table pillars

and tops. On the other hand, perhaps turners could have turned parts for chairs (Windsor

or slat-back) and tables in the same shop, supplying different retailers. Evans asserts that

the Windsor chair industry took off especially fast in Philadelphia where turners appeared

in abundance. That might begin to explain the high incidence of tilt-top tables with box

mechanisms in that city. More turners meant more specialization and increased supply,

making the small pillars in the boxes more available and affordable. Further study could

illuminate additional connections between tilt-top table production and the chair industry,

the transfer of turning skills, and the exact nature of the commercial relationships

between these specialists. This preliminary comparison, however, not only begins to

explain why tilt-top tables appeared in the 1740s, but also suggests one source of the

networks of commercial exchange that characterized their production.61

The exact nature of individual relationships of exchange between specialized

craftsmen making tilt-top tables depended on complex sets of variables unique to each

situation. Some ran their own shops working as jobbers for large cabinetmaking

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. operations. Others worked as journeymen within the cabinetmaking shops. Each

individual created a unique situation. In general, however, they seem to have readily

adapted their business relationships in order to maximize production and profit. In the

first place, they may have chosen to make tilt-top tables because their relatively simple

construction was conducive to collaborative production by specialists. Like Boston-type

chairs, they were easily assembled from component parts requiring little coordination

between the craftsmen involved. If a cabinetmaker bought a top from a turner, he could

connect it to any pillar by building a box or making a block. If he bought two turned

pillars, he could attach a large top to one and a small top to the other, depending on his

customers’ preferences. In other words, the joints between tops and pillars did not

require specialized fitting. This allowed craftsmen to trade them with little prerequisite

cooperation thus reducing production time and cost.

Similarly, the decoration on tilt-top table parts may have required cabinetmakers

and carvers to coordinate less than when making other forms of furniture. On a

rectangular table, for instance, the carving on the knee and the adjacent knee block or rail

always matched in order to conceal the joint. This often required that the carver retouch

his work after the pieces were assembled, making communication between the person

constructing the frame and the carver essential.62 This was not the case for tilt-top tables.

The form emphasized rather than disguised the joints between its parts. The legs met the

pillar at striking angles and indeed the most salient aspect of the tables—their tilting

tops—was a joint. Even on some elaborately decorated versions, carved motifs did not

continue from one component part to another. Leaves on the knees stayed on the knees.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. They may have dangled over the edges of the leg but they very seldom reached onto the

pillars (see fig. 23 b and d). In fact, few tilt-top tables even display carved motifs on the

knees or feet that match or correspond to the carved motifs on the pillar, neither on the

compressed ball nor on the quarter-round collar. In other words, carvers could carve the

legs and the pillars independently of each other and another craftsman could still

assemble them to make an aesthetically appealing tilt-top table. Less coordination

required less production time, making tilt-top tables cheaper to produce, easier to sell,

and therefore more profitable. This may have encouraged artisans to make them,

contributing to the wide proliferation of the form.

Some evidence suggests that craftsmen frequently rearranged their business

relationships in order to maximize efficiency. Luke Beckerdite has identified a group of

four tilt-top tables sold by the same unidentified New York cabinetmaking shop with

carved motifs that are similar but carved by four different craftsmen. Two tables share

nearly identical vertical acanthus leaf patterns carved in the balusters. The difference in

relief and technique of the carving, however, indicates that the craftsman coordinating the

assembly and sale of these tables sent the two pillars to different carvers to be decorated.

There are many explanations for this. Perhaps he had found a carver who charged less

and decided to work primarily with him. Perhaps, since one pillar’s relief is distinctly

lower than the other, he needed a carved pillar with a popular motif but which could be

sold at a slightly lower price leading him to choose a less expensive carver. Or, maybe

the cabinetmaker had to ask a different carver because the carver with whom he usually

worked had died or moved, or was too busy or ill. Regardless, this New York craftsman

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. adapted his working relationships according to changing circumstances in order to

maintain or maximize his profit.63

A cabinetmakers’ price list published in Philadelphia in 1772 illuminates details

regarding the money exchanged between craftsmen making tilt-top tables, and suggests

the amount of time it took craftsmen to perform specific tasks. While no printed version

survives, two hand-copied transcriptions preserve the list. One bears no name, and the

other was copied into a manuscript book in 1786 by a Germantown lumber dealer named

Benjamin Lehman. No guild or professional company regulated the cabinetmakers’ trade

in any American city in this era, but the fact that enough Philadelphia craftsmen agreed

upon these prices to warrant a published list, and that it was still being used by Lehman

fourteen years later, suggests that craftsmen followed it to some degree. More

importantly, the price list suggests that Philadelphia craftsmen consciously attempted to

regulate the financial aspect of their business exchanges.64

The list had three columns of prices for each piece of furniture (see Table 1).

Two columns gave different prices for the piece depending on its material, either

mahogany or walnut. The third column designated the wages that a master should pay

his journeyman for his labor. Since the journeyman was paid for his time, the list allows

us to deduce which tilt-top table features took longer to make than others and how much

craftsmen were paid for their work. Constructing a “folding stand” with a box earned the

journeyman eleven shillings, over seven times as much as the one and a half shillings he

earned constructing a stand with a fixed top. This suggests that making a box took

considerable time. Constructing a full-sized “tea table” earned the journeyman twelve

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE 1 1772 Philadelphia Price List No printed edition survives but the two hand-written versions transcribed here preserve the prices that cabinetmakers agreed to charge for many different furniture forms. All prices given in pounds, shillings, and pence.

Unidentified version, transcribed c.177265

Tea Tables mahogany walnut journeyman Plain top & feet 2.15.0 1.15.0 0.12.6 Plain tea table with claw feet 3.15.0 2.5.0 0.12.6 Ditto leaves on the knees 4.0.0 2.15.0 1.2.6 Ad for fluting the piller 5 & journey 0.2.6

Folding Stands Stand 22 Inches with a box plain top & feet 1.15.0 1.5.0 0.11.0 Ditto plain top & claw feet 2 . 2.6 1. 12.6 0 . 11.0 Ditto with leaves on the knees 2 . 10.0 2 . 0.0 0 . 11.0 Ditto fixed 18 inches 1.4.0 0.16.0 0.7.6 Ad for fluting the piller 5 & to journeyman 0.2.6

Square Tea Tables Tea Table Square top plain Feet & rail 3.0.0 2.5.0 1.5.0 Ditto claw feet 3.10.0 2.15.0 1.5.0 Ditto leaves on the knees 4.10.0 3.10.0 1.5.0 Ditto with carved Rails 6.0.0 1.5.0

Benjamin Lehman version, transcribed c.178666 Discrepancies between the two versions (highlighted in bold) may indicate a change in pricing practices between 1772 and 1786, or an error in transcription in either or both years.

Tea Tables mahogany walnut journeyman Plain top & feet 2.15.0 1.15.0 1.0.0 Plain tea table with claw feet 3.5.0 2.5.0 0.12.6 Ditto leaves on the knees 4.0.0 2.15.0 0.12.6 Ditto Scallop’d Top & Carv’d Billar [sic] 5.15.0 1.2.6 Ad for fluting the pillar 5 & journey 0.2.6

Lehman's prices for Folding Stands and Square Tea Tables match the 1772 list.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and a half shillings, one and a half shillings more than constructing a “folding stand,”

which was the same table but with a smaller top. This suggests that the larger the

diameter of the top, the longer it took to turn. The journeyman was paid two and a half

shillings for “fluting the pillar” of any tilt-top table, suggesting that carving flutes took

nearly a sixth of the time that it took to make the entire table. Making tilt-top tables in

general, however, earned a Philadelphia journeyman less than making any other kind of

“tea table.” A “square tea table” with a rectangular frame and cabriole legs earned the

journeyman £1.5.0. twice as much as making a tilt-top table. And making a rectangular

“China table” with a pierced gallery, earned the journeyman even more, £1.15.0. The

fact that journeymen could make tilt-top tables at half the price of other tea tables may

begin to explain the preponderance of tilt-top tables in the Philadelphia region. A

comparison of prices in Philadelphia with prices in other cities follows later in the study.

The price list also allows us to speculate about the sums that masters paid to

independent carvers. After the master paid the journeyman from the total sum acquired

for each table sold, a certain sum remained. That sum presumably covered the price of

the wood used and any out-of-shop costs, including carving. Any remaining sum

probably went to the master himself. For example, the price list suggests that a

cabinetmaker charge a customer £3.15.0 for a mahogany circular tilt-top "tea table" with

a “plain top” and “claw feet.” Of the sum received, the master should pay his

journeyman £0.12.6 for his labor, and keep the rest to cover his costs. On the other hand,

if the cabinetmaker sold the same table with carved “leaves on the knees,” he should

charge the customer five shillings more, a total of £4.0.0. He should pay his journeyman.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. however, the same sum as for the plain table. The extra five shillings, we can assume,

were paid to the carver who decorated the knees. This pattern repeats for every carved

table listed, though the consistency of the amount paid to the carver varies and is

indeterminable in some cases due to a discrepancy between the two versions of the list.

Overall, the Philadelphia price list demonstrates that craftsmen in that city consciously

arranged their business relationships as an important aspect of their production strategy.

While craftsmen in Philadelphia tried to regulate their interactions, in reality,

craftsmen constantly shifted their relationships, especially those operating in smaller

markets. Therefore, we cannot make simplistic assumptions about whether the primary

makers of tilt-top tables—who assembled and sold them—were cabinetmakers, joiners,

or turners. While advertisements survive for turner’s products, none survive from

cabinetmakers advertising that they had “tea table legs” for sale. This suggests that

turners sold their wares to cabinetmakers rather than vice-versa. It remains possible,

however, that a turner could have been the primary craftsman initiating the construction

and overseeing the marketing of the final table, especially a turner with experience in

high-volume chair-making. Having turned two of the component parts—the top and the

pillar—he could have obtained legs from any reasonably skilled woodworker or even

made them himself with a saw and spokeshave. The ambiguities and constant shifting of

craft specialties remind us that essentially any enterprising person who recognized a

desire among consumers for tilt-top tables, whether in a city or a small town, whether

specializing in one trade or offering several simultaneously, could devise an efficient way

to produce or procure the necessary parts.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In addition to developing local business networks with neighbors specifically

involved in tilt-top table production, craftsmen also “participated in a network of

specialists that spanned the Atlantic.”6' Through merchants taking advantage of

favorable economic conditions, tools came from Sheffield, and nails and hardware from

Birmingham. An urban craftsman may have bought imported hardware from the

merchant next door or perhaps even brokered exchanges himself when his finances

allowed. Rural artisans had to travel farther, but they too bought items made available

through the Atlantic trade networks. Acquiring wood also connected craftsmen to larger

systems of trade. Merchants sold mahogany from the West Indies and South America,

but even acquiring less exotic woods involved a web of commercial exchange. While

many craftsmen kept business accounts with local mill owners to buy pre-cut boards,

many also traveled periodically to nearby towns or cities to acquire different woods from

different mills or lumber merchants. Urban artisans may have had more contact with

merchants than millers, but for the majority, acquiring wood required developing local

and extra-local business relationships.68

Examining the overall design for tilt-top tables indicates that the greater Atlantic

trade networks profoundly influenced the appearance of the final products. Craftsmen

did not rely on design books published in London when making tilt-top tables in the

colonies. They had already been making tilt-top tables for over two decades by the 1760s

when English printed design books began to appear in North America. The third edition

of Thomas Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director published in 1762

illustrated pillar and claw firescreen pedestals and tall tripod candlestands with

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sophisticated scroll feet and perforated legs with cyma-curves and asymmetrical organic

protuberances. Similar designs appeared in William Ince & John Mayhew’s The

Universal System of Household Furniture published first in 1759 in London, including a

page of “Claw Tables” with comparable pillars (fig. 26). Neither book arrived on North

American shores until at least 1766, and even then only in limited copies. While some

tables made after the mid-1760s suggest that craftsmen may have imitated the pierced

pillar and claws in the illustrations, very few American-made tables look like English

designs.69

Rather than copying printed books, craftsmen appear to have based their designs

for tilt-top tables on their training and first-hand exposure to individual objects. While

some craftsmen may have called on their own imaginations, most made tables the way

their masters taught them or adopted someone else's popular design. As discussed above,

design features including spiral fluted urns came to America in the minds of immigrant

craftsmen and were perpetuated through the apprenticeship system and the workmanship

of habit. Remembering that many craftsmen who brought those designs came to America

hoping to profit economically from the growing trade between Europe and numerous

North American coastal ports, we begin to recognize that networks of exchange between

craftsmen and merchants influenced not only the initial appearance and proliferation of

tilt-top tables in the colonies but also their overall shape and decorative features. This

challenges traditional furniture scholarship which has too often attributed design changes

to English printed sources, discounting the influence of migration and the workmanship

of habit on products made by modest artisans for customers in the middling sort.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 26. “Claw Tables.” William Ince & John Mayhew. The Universal System o f Household Furniture. London: 1762. Plate 13. Courtesy, Winterthur Library.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In addition to the memories of immigrant craftsmen, non-furniture goods that

moved through Atlantic trade networks also influenced the designs for tilt-top tables in

North America. This can best be seen in the design for scalloped tops. Elaborate

tabletops in England—both in drawings and on tables themselves—exhibited a wide

array of edge designs. Often they had half-circle scallops with molded or galleried edges.

Sometimes carved floral patterns flowed onto the table surfaces, often in such varying

degrees of relief that the edges appeared almost feathered.70 By contrast, most American-

made scalloped tops had simple molded edges in cyma-curve patterns. Colonial

craftsmen modeled these scalloped tops after the molded edges of silver footed trays or

salvers that became popular in London beginning in the 1730s (fig. 27).71 Those who

could afford to, served tea and other polite libations on salvers, and probably developed

scalloped tilt-top tables as stylish stands to match, visually transferring some of the

cultural value associated with fashionable silver to the tables themselves. Merchants in

all major North American cities imported scalloped silver salvers from England and

actually called them “silver tea tables,” further strengthening the link between the two

objects.72 American silversmiths also made them, providing easily available models for

American carvers. Even the most elaborate American scalloped tops look more like

salvers than like English tables. In short, the idea and the design for tilt-top tables came

to American craftsmen by way of people and objects that traveled through Atlantic trade

networks.

This in depth exploration of the craftsmen making tilt-top tables—their craft

practices, business relationships, and design influences—is vital to understanding the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 27. Silver salver (top) and scalloped top (bottom). Craftsmen making scalloped tops probably imitated the designs o f silver salvers being imported from England. Silver salver, marked “EC,” c.1775. Courtesy, Decorative Arts Photographic Collection, Winterthur Museum, 68.5648. Tabletop, Mahogany, New York, 1760-90, detail. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1965.2904.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tables as commodities. Craftsmen who had chosen to specialize to increase their

productivity and profit probably chose to make tilt-top tables because their relatively

simple construction allowed them to collaborate with other specialists to produce the final

product. Their relationships of exchange, which may have been based on the chair

industry, played an important role in their overall production strategies by increasing

efficiency, output, and income. Ultimately, the trade networks that influenced the

craftsmen spanned the colonies and England, making tilt-top tables a product of the

economic growth that revolutionized mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic commerce.

Distributors

Having established that Martin’s first key player—the maker—was seldom one

person, we will further complicate the story by exploring how distributors sold tilt-top

tables. Distributors played a significant part in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy.

McCusker and Menard suggest that many colonists found the carrying trade to be one of

the most economical ways to balance their accounts with British merchants. An

“important alternative strategy to the export of commodities,” transporting merchandise

and raw cargo became a profitable tactic for settlers, “the vast majority [of whom] came

to improve their economic condition.”73 Those aspiring to profit from the coastal trade

often started as artisans who began accompanying their manufactured goods as

commission merchants. Successful entrepreneurs eventually bought their own ships and

became independent exporters.

Such participation in the trans-Atlantic trade economy attracted ambitious

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. entrepreneurs not only with its profitability but also with its distinct flavor of

“Britishness.” Historian Linda Colley has demonstrated that, in an era of almost constant

war with France, both the British elite and middling sort became “unabashedly

chauvinistic,” defining themselves as democratized citizens of a Protestant empire that

dominated Atlantic commerce. A successful merchant not only gained a personal

fortune, but also contributed to the national cause by bolstering British commercial (and

cultural) hegemony. By the second third of the eighteenth century, many British

merchants rooted on the American side of the Atlantic were “fully in command of the

coastwise commerce,” and were amassing substantial fortunes and building some of the

most fashionable houses in North American cities.74 Due in large part to this merchant-

based economy, white people in North America are generally believed to have enjoyed

the highest standard of living in the British Empire in the thirty years before the

Revolution.75

Tilt-top tables may have accompanied the dry goods, imported porcelain,

stoneware, brass hardware and other luxury goods that filled the colonial merchants’

ships. Unfortunately, neither economic nor decorative arts historians have studied the

business of colonial merchants in detail, making elusive the full sense of how they bought

and sold furniture and furniture parts in the pre-Revolutionary economy. Several sources,

however, provide preliminary glimpses. The Complete English Tradesman, published in

London in 1727 by social commentator and novelist Daniel Defoe, suggests the

complicated web of commercial entrepreneurs and artisans that drove the British

economy. Over the previous seven years, King George I’s principal minister Robert

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Walpole had been tending to the economic disaster that followed the bursting of the

South Sea Bubble in 1720. The government had over-extended the public’s investments

in the Asian trade. When nervous investors wanted to cash in and the government could

not respond, panic and widespread distrust ensued. Defoe’s agenda included encouraging

financial prudence among the adventurous young tradesmen who were contributing in

large part to the successful recovery of the national economy.76

Defoe defined “tradesmen” in London as “all sorts of warehousekeepers,

shopkeepers, whether wholesale dealers, or retailers of goods” who “do not actually work

upon, make, or manufacture the goods they sell.” In other words, tradesmen operated as

middlemen between the people who made the goods and the people who bought the

goods. Those in retail bought goods from the manufacturers and sold them to customers.

Tradesmen in wholesale bought goods from manufacturers and sold them to other

tradesmen, sometimes ship factors, retailers, or merchants. Merchants in Defoe’s

vocabulary referred exclusively to people who imported and exported goods to and from

foreign shores (including North America). While merchants operated in “a degree of

traders above” the tradesmen, the fact that Defoe wrote a large tome promoting the

tradesmen’s pursuits testifies to their importance in the growing economy. Immigrants

coming to America from rural Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland in the decades

after Defoe’s handbook might have used different terms to refer to all the various types of

distributors, but they would have been familiar with the network itself. They knew that

profit came from the transport of goods between makers and buyers.77

The best evidence demonstrating how distributors bought and sold furniture in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. colonial America springs from Newport. Further investigation in other cities would

probably uncover similar activity in non-local trade among fiimiture-makers.78 The

boundaries between makers and distributors in Newport were much more fluid than in

Defoe’s London. The city’s economy thrived beginning in the 1750s, attracting a

disproportionately large number of merchants and cabinetmakers who actively

participated in the Atlantic trade. Ambitious merchants like Aaron Lopez filled ships

with diversified cargoes including dry goods, slaves, English imported goods, and

furniture that he bought through the commercial relationships that he maintained with ten

Newport cabinetmakers. In many cases, however, the cabinetmakers themselves became

their own merchants. Jeanne Vibert Sloane has written that “virtually all” Newport

cabinetmakers in this era pursued the export trade, stockpiling their shops with

standardized items to be sold both wholesale and retail and shipped year-round down the

coast. She studied John Cahoone, an “aggressive exporter,” who gained 43 percent of his

annual income in the 1750s from venture cargo containing desks and tables. Similarly,

Christopher Townsend became the wealthiest member of his family by exporting his

furniture in the 1760s.79

Margaretta M. Lovell has called the relationships between Newport’s makers and

distributors unhierarchical, writing that “makers traded and traders made.” She argued

that the “producer-entrepreneur” was the center of the city’s economy because he

“created a vendable something out of apparent nothingness, and provided the merchants

with commodities to exchange.” Lovell also demonstrated that Newport distributors sold

to a “complex [patron group], simultaneously including local dignitaries, the hatter next

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. door, and an unknown shop-keeper in distant Charleston in need of a desk.” Each

craftsman in Newport developed individual strategies to gain profit, but for many, their

strategies included distribution.80

Patricia E. Kane has argued that some Newport craftsmen made standard tilt-top

tables exclusively for the export market. She identified a group of eleven extant tables

with plain columns, plain legs, and stepped cleats. Each table’s column has different

moldings, the joints between the legs and pillars differ, and the cleats have different step

profiles. This demonstrates that many different craftsmen were making similar tables—a

“standard” type (fig. 28). She determined that these were called “fly tables” based on a

surviving bill and accompanying table sold by John Goddard to James Atkinson in 1773

(fig. 29).81 Even though “fly table” in London referred to a breakfast table with fly-

supported leaves, some Newport craftsmen seem to have used the term to refer to tilt-top

tables, which they made in great quantity especially in the early 1760s.82

While no documentary evidence confirms that Newport distributors shipped tilt-

top tables, the previously mentioned table that Joshua G. Wright imported to Wilmington,

North Carolina from Newport looked almost identical to Kane’s standard forms.83 Also,

Figure 6 illustrates that the plain column “Newport standard” table appeared throughout

the colonies, suggesting either that Newport exports influenced production elsewhere, or

that the same English source informed the design in many port cities including Newport.

In addition, tilt-top tables would have been well-suited for export. By crating them with

the tops tilted up, distributors would have reduced the overall volume of the crate and

saved space in the hull of their ships. Exporting tilt-top table parts would have been even

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 28. Tilt-top table from Newport that closely resembles the tables that Patricia E. Kane identified as a “standard” type made for export. Mahogany, Newport, 1740-90. Courtesy, Estate Antiques, Inc.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 29. Goddard-Atkinson table. A bill that survives with this table suggests that John Goddard of Newport sold it to James Atkinson in 1773 for £3. Mahogany, Newport, 1773. Courtesy, The John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. easier for distributors. Crated table tops, even with boxes attached, could have been

packed tightly into ships, as could pillars without the legs.

Even though the exact relationships between distributors and tilt-top tables require

further research, recognizing the role of distributors in the overall success of the North

Atlantic economy impacts this study. A general increase in wealth among the merchants

who took advantage of the favorable economic conditions raised the overall wealth of the

colonies. More wealth among more people fueled demand for refined goods including

tilt-top tables. In addition, the majority of the new merchants were not members of the

British elite. Ambitious businessmen from modest backgrounds, they dramatically raised

the wealth and social stature of the middle sort. In other words, distributors not only

made tilt-top tables available to more people by physically transporting them through the

landscape, but also their economic success fueled the economy in which more people

could afford refined lifestyles, including tilt-top tables.84

Buyers

People who made and distributed tilt-top tables sold them to customers, whose

choices in purchasing them hinged to a large degree on price. Unfortunately, historians

have seldom studied the prices of furniture systematically within individual cities and

even less frequently between cities. While thousands of tilt-top tables survive, very few

of them have bills of sale documenting how much they cost. Cabinetmakers’ account

books and the two price lists published during this era, one in Providence in 1756 and

1757 and a second in Philadelphia in 1772, can provide information about the differences

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in prices over time and in different regions. Such an extensive examination, however,

would require more than the year allotted for this study. As a preliminary investigation, I

use prices drawn from published account books and known bills of sale to explore the

costs of tilt-top tables in colonial America and extrapolate information about the people

who bought them.

When deciding to buy a tilt-top table, consumers had many choices. First, if they

wanted a tea table, they had to choose between rectangular tray-top tea tables, and

circular tilt-top tables. In 1756, six cabinetmakers in Providence, Rhode Island agreed

upon a set of prices for common furniture forms (which rose somewhat in an agreement

the following year due to the outrageous inflation in that colony) (see Table 2).85 They

agreed to sell “common tea tables” for £7 (which equaled about six shillings in 1756

London Sterling),86 which may have looked like the rectangular, framed, porringer-top

tea tables that Jeanne Vibert Sloane suspects were produced in large number for export in

Newport.87 They agreed to sell tilt-top tables, which they called “stand tables,” for

significantly more: £15, £18, or £22 depending on the wood (£0.12.0, £0.14.5, £0.17.7).

They also sold smaller tilt-top tables, “candle stands” with tops of unspecified size, for

£8. £10. or £12 (£0.6.5, £0.8.0. £0.9.7). According to this list. Providence consumers

thinking of buying a tea table, chose to make a significant investment if they bought a

tilt-top version (fig. 30). Customers in Charleston, South Carolina buying from

cabinetmaker Thomas Elfe did not have to base their decision between rectangular and

tilt-top tea tables on cost because his accounts suggest that in the early 1770s he sold the

two types for approximately the same price, about £15 (£2 in 1773). Unfortunately,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TA BLE 2 DO 1756 and 1757 Providence Price Agreement In 1756 and 1757, six cabinetmakers in Providence, Rhode island agreed to charge standard prices for many furniture forms. All prices given in pounds. (Note that Rhode Island currency in these years was hugely inflated. £100 London Sterling would buy over £2200 Rhode Island currency.)89

Item 18 Feb 1756 24 Mar 1757 Common tea table 7 10 Mahogany stand table 22 30 Black Walnut stand table 18 20 Maple stand table 15 10 Candle stand with mahogany 12 12 Candle stand with black walnut 10 12 Candle stand with maple 8 10

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Choosing Tea Table Shapes according to the Providence Price List, 1756-7 Circular tilt-top tables cost more than rectangular tea tables.

£7

£8-22

Choosing Tea Table Shapes from the Shop of Thomas Elfe in Charleston, South Carolina, 1770s Elfe charged about the same for his circular tilt-top tables and his rectangular tea tables.

£15 £15 O l= ZX

Choosing Tea Table Shapes according to the Philadelphia Price List, 1772 Circular tilt-top tables cost less than rectangular tea tables.

£4

£6

Figure 30. Price differences between rectangular tea tables and circular tilt-top tables in three cities. Note that the given prices cannot be directly compared without calculating for inflation and differences between the currencies o f each colony.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sufficient records for investigating prices in New York and Boston are not available.90

In Philadelphia, in contrast to Providence and Charleston, tilt-top tables seem to

have cost slightly less than rectangular tea tables. According to the 1772 price list, the

most expensive “Square tea table” with “Plain top, claw feet, carved rail, leaves on

knees” cost £6 (£3.14.7) while the most expensive tilt-top table with “Plain top. claw feet,

and leaves on knees” cost £4 (£2.9.9). Even the "Scallop’d top & carv’d Billar [pillar]”

that appears on Lehman’s 1785 version of the price list at £5.15.0 (£3.11.7) does not

exceed the listed price for rectangular tables. Neither does the table bought by John and

Elizabeth Cadwalader from Thomas Affleck in 1770, one of the most elaborately

decorated American tilt-top tables known, with hairy paw feet, asymmetrical rococo knee

carving, rope carving on the base of the pillar, a fluted column, and a ribbon-and-flower

motif around the edge of the top. It probably cost £4.10.0. £1.5.0 less than the most

expensive rectangular tea table listed just two years later in the price list.91 The fact that

tilt-top tea tables were cheaper in Philadelphia than rectangular ones might begin to

explain why Philadelphians bought so many of them.

Once a consumer decided to buy a tilt-top table, he or she often had to choose the

diameter of the top. As stated, tables were generally twenty-eight to thirty-six inches in

diameter; they tended to be slightly larger in the Philadelphia area. Just as consumers

could choose to add carving to a foot or a leg, they could also choose from several

standard sizes. Thomas Elfe’s accounts indicate that he sold tilt-top tables, which he

simply called “tea tables,” for between £10 and £14 at increments of £1 (£1.7.3 and

£1.18.3 in 1773). He tended to call the more expensive tables “large tea tables.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. suggesting that less expensive tables dropped in size with price. His five standard prices

suggest that he sold tilt-top tables in five standard sizes. The idea that some craftsmen

conceived of turned tops in incremental sizes with incremental prices is supported by the

accounts of Job Townsend, Jr. in Newport. On the inside front cover of his account book,

Townsend wrote “The price of tea boards / the year AD 1769.”92 Tea boards were

probably turned circular trays very similar to dished tilt-top table tops but smaller.

Townsend made tea boards from six to twenty inches in diameter, and his customers

could buy them for between £1.15.0 and £20. paying ten or fifteen shillings or several

pounds more for each additional inch. While Townsend did not record selling tilt-top

table tops individually, he owned a lathe and certainly made them for the tilt-top tables

that he sold. His standardized price list indicates that he conceived of turned circular

trays, whether tea boards or table tops, in incremental sizes and prices.93

Customers who wanted to buy a stylish tilt-top table for tea drinking but who

lacked the funds or space for a full-sized version could have chosen a candlestand. Many

tables with tops smaller than twenty-two inches in diameter had the same features, stylish

proportions, and elaborate decorations as full-sized tilt-top tables. For instance, a

“candlestand” from Charleston has an intricately scalloped top, well-articulated ball-and-

claw feet, a fluted pillar, and carved decorative ball (fig. 31). Also, a tilt-top table from

Philadelphia with a candlestand-sized top (twenty-one and a half inches) has elaborate

rococo carving and one of the most sculptural scalloped tops known to have been made in

America.94 A twenty-two-inch top easily could have accommodated tea drinkers, holding

a tea pot, two cups and even a plate of cakes or other tea goodies. For a successful family

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 31. “Candlestand.” Because this tilt-top table’s top measures less than 22 inches, it has often been called a candlestand. Its elaborately scalloped top, fluted pillar, and carved ball, knees, and feet, however, match the most expensive full-sized tilt-top tables. It could have been a candlestand in large room, or a tea table in a smaller room. Mahogany, Charleston, 1765-80. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift o f Henry Francis du Pont. 1952.259.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. living in an urban townhouse, the small size might have better accommodated their living

conditions. In Philadelphia townhouses, front parlors often measured scarcely larger than

seventeen by seventeen feet. A full-sized thirty-six-inch table would have occupied a

significant portion of that room even when tilted up and stored in a comer.

The type of wood used also determined the cost of tilt-top tables. Once again, the

Philadelphia cabinetmaker’s price list o f 1772 offers insight into consumers’ choices

between different types of wood. Tilt-top tables o f all sizes with all features were listed

in both mahogany and walnut except the folding stand with a fixed top o f eighteen

inches, which was only listed in mahogany, and only cost £1.4.0 (£0.14.9 in 1772). For

consumers buying tables from craftsmen who followed the pricing system o f this list,

mahogany tables tended to be between one and a half and one and a quarter times more

expensive than walnut tables. For instance, a consumer could buy a tilt-top table made of

walnut with a plain top and plain feet for £1.15.0 (£1.1.10). Or, he or she could buy the

same table in mahogany for £2.15.0 (£1.14.2), approximately one and a half times more.

For the same price as the plain mahogany table, however, a consumer could buy an

elaborate walnut table with claw feet and carved knees. With a specific sum to spend,

consumers had to choose whether they wanted a more valued wood (mahogany) or more

valued decorative features (carving). The 1756 and 1757 price agreements from

Providence demonstrate similar price patterns. Mahogany tables cost one and a quarter

times more than walnut which cost one and a quarter times more than maple. While

cabinetmakers in Philadelphia did not include maple tilt-top tables in their list, many

maple tables survive from southeastern Pennsylvania, indicating that consumers in that

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. region also had the cheaper option.

Just as carving added significant cost for the cabinetmaker who hired a

professional or took the time to carve the table parts himself, carving also raised the price

for the consumer. While Thomas Elfe’s customers bought “tea tables” for between £10

and £14. they bought carved ones for between £28 and £40 (£3.17.0 and £5.10.0 in

1773). The 1772 Philadelphia Price List indicates that commonly carved features—either

claw feet or carved knees—were standard options for customers. They could choose one,

both, or none. Another standard feature was a fluted column that added £0.2.6 to the total

price. Philadelphia consumers with additional funds, of course, could choose non

standard features that probably cost more. Constrained only by their whims and the skills

o f the carvers available to them, consumers chose carved compressed balls, leafy

balusters, imbrocation or other carved patterns between the legs, guilloche ropes on the

pillar, and hairy paw feet. According to the Philadelphia price list, the standard carved

elements added between five shillings and seven shillings six pence to the total price of

the table, roughly between 8 and 20 percent of the total price. This is less than in Elfe’s

Charleston shop where the carving comprised roughly 35 percent of the total price.

Neither the price lists from Providence nor the accounts from Newport offer significant

information about carved tables in Rhode Island, perhaps because customers there

preferred plain surfaces over carved. Indeed, few carved tilt-top tables survive from

Rhode Island. Overall, carving added significantly to the price o f a table, but the exact

price or percentage of the total depended on the amount of carving desired and the

business relationships between the primary craftsman and the carver.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. When deciding to buy a tilt-top table, consumers chose to invest money that could

have bought many other household items. Compared to other pieces of furniture, tilt-top

tables carried a moderate cost. In Philadelphia, they cost less than the set of six fine

“Walnut leather bottom chairs” that William Savery sold to John Cadwalader for £7 in

1770. On the other hand, in Milford, Connecticut, they probably cost more than the set of

six plain turned painted chairs that John and Samuel Durand sold for between £1.16.0 and

£2.20.0. Uniformly, tilt-top tables cost much less than case furniture. In 1756, the

Providence cabinetmakers agreed to charge four and a half times more for a “Mahogany

high case o f drawers” as for a “Mahogany stand table.” And John Cadwalader paid

Thomas Affleck about twice as much for his mahogany desk as for his tilt-top table.

Records indicate that George Washington imported stoneware dishes from London to Mt.

Vemon in 1757. For the £1.9.4 (£1.3.3) that he spent on “6 doz. white stone plates” and

“4 doz. Patti pans 4 sizes” (Patti pans are small tart dishes), he probably could have

bought a tilt-top table imported from Providence. Unfortunately, more accounts and bills

survive from elite consumers than from the middle sort, causing the price relationships

between tilt-top tables and other furniture to be somewhat skewed toward the high-end

consumers.95

For the price of a tilt-top table, a consumer could have bought a significant

amount of food. According to the average monthly wholesale prices in Philadelphia

calculated for January 1772 and the cabinetmakers’ price book of that year, consumers

could buy a mahogany tilt-top table with ball-and-claw feet and carved knees for about

the same price as 400 pounds of rice. As elaborated in Table 3, they also could have

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TA BLE3 Prices of Tilt-top Tables Compared to Foodstuffs

PHILADELPHIA 1772s6 According to the 1772 Price List, a tilt-top table in mahogany with claw feet and carved knees cost £4. For that sum, Philadelphia buyers could have bought

Tilt-top table, 400 lbs. rice 246 lbs. 'A barrel 19 gal. West 35 V2 gal. mahogany, tobacco imported Indian rum New England claw feet. Madeira wine rum leaves on the knees

MASSACHUSETTS 178497 In 1784, Jonathan Gavet, a Salem cabinetmaker, sold a tilt-to table for £1.8.0. For that sum, buyers could have bought:

Gavet’s 3 % 140 49 lbs. 30 14 10 1/2 14 gal. 17.7 17.7 gal. tilt-top bushels lbs. Muscovado lbs. Bohea New lbs. molasses table assize flour sugar coffee tea England cotton wheat rum

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bought significant luxury goods to enjoy or sell. Similar price relationships existed for

Massachusetts consumers. Ultimately, a tilt-top table required significant expense, but

for those outfitting a stylish house intended to entertain and impress, tilt-top tables ranked

somewhere in the middle on the scale o f expensive necessities.

While additional evidence of tilt-top table prices would allow more precise

conclusions, this preliminary exploration highlights the finely graded price differences

between the choices available to consumers, including size, wood, and decorative

features. The fact that makers segmented their products by price suggests that they were

well attuned to and opportunistic about the differences between their consumers. They

exploited the different demands coming from a consumer base segmented by wealth.

Except for the poor, most consumers could probably afford some type o f tilt-top table.

People could weigh their preferences against their cash or credit and choose between the

many options offered by the makers and retailers. Buyers could fine tune their choices to

fit their needs and desires. While those o f moderate means might choose one plain

walnut or maple table, the wealthy might buy elaborate expensive versions for their main

parlors, and plain versions for their family rooms or chambers.

While the price of tilt-top tables influenced buyers’ decisions, other factors surely

played a part. One consideration may have been their appealing appearance. As simple

as it sounds, maybe people chose tilt-top tables because they were pretty. As historians,

we tend to discount aesthetic considerations mostly because they are so difficult to

quantify. How can we measure the degree to which an individual liked an object? Or

why? Often in the twenty-first century we are unable to explain why we ourselves—

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. much less strangers—prefer one object over another. Nevertheless, individuals develop

specific tastes—however intangible—that influence their preferences. Between 1740 and

1790. many people in the British North American colonies liked household objects that

seemed to defy gravity in fanciful organic shapes. Tilt-top tables, in a simplified,

abstracted way, may have echoed the fondness for silver and ceramic epergnes with

delicate branches reaching out from a central core; or the pyramids of dessert glasses that

rose dramatically from the most stylish dining tables (fig. 32). The fancifully carved

knees, ball-and-claw feet, and neat moldings applied to geometric and regular tilt-top

table parts would have appealed to consumers’ tastes for the peculiarly American version

of the Rococo.98 Each buyer surely harbored different preferences, and while aesthetic

considerations remain impossible to quantify, it is important to recognize that the

popularity of tilt-top tables relied in part on their consistency with the particular taste that

dominated among mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-American consumers.

Users

The total time spent making, distributing, and buying tilt-top tables was relatively

small compared with the amount of time people spent living with them. Those who

walked past them in their parlors everyday, moved them from kitchen to chamber to

dining room, and savored the special occasions for which they often were reserved,

imbued them with significance over time. That significance stemmed not only from the

interactions between individuals and their tables, but also from the cultural, political, and

economic forces of the day.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 32. Silver Epergne. London, William Cripps, 1759/60. From John D. Davis, Colonial Silver at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 110.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tilt-top tables were flexible. Unlike rectangular tables on frames, they could

change shape to fit into different spaces. By tilting up the tops, people could store their

tables when not in use. In some cases, the block and the pillar were assembled in such a

way that one of the tripod feet extended perpendicularly behind the vertical face of the

tilted top (fig. 33). By placing the single foot in the comer of a room, users could store

the table out of the way. In other cases, craftsmen arranged the top and the tripod so that

the two splayed feet were behind the tilted top. This allowed users to push the table close

to a flat wall. Tables with boxes offered a choice. Since the top could rotate, users could

arrange the tilted top and the tripod to fit the table either into a comer or up against a

wall.

Their malleable form placed tilt-top tables within a larger genre of multi-purpose

space-saving furniture. Northern Europeans had been using furniture throughout the

seventeenth century that changed shape to accommodate different spaces and uses.

Germans made tables with foldable frames and removable tops. Continental and English

craftsmen made tables with gate-legs and folding leaves. People used these tables for

social or family events in the center of the room then condensed them to be stored around

its perimeter. Such movable furniture allowed users to manipulate their interior spaces

according to their needs. More research might further illuminate the European source of

the tilt-top table’s pintel and cleat mechanism. David Barquist has tentatively suggested

that it derived from sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch chair-tables, yet another

European space-saving form. Overall, the ability of the tilt-top table to change shape and

be stored out of the way was not revolutionary. The specific combination of its parts

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 33. Tilt-top table assembled to fit into the comer o f a room. Mahogany, attributed to Norfolk. Virginia, 1750-70. Courtesy, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1983-23.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. intended to tilt, however, was new. Tops that tilted on central pillars and tripod feet had

not appeared in great number in European traditions before the early eighteenth century."

Scholars have sometimes claimed that tables stored with their tops tilted up

functioned on a socio-technic level.100 In other words, users valued the ornamental

quality of the top’s scalloped edge or its smooth figured wood not only for its beauty

when in use but also for pure display when tilted up. The roots of this suggestion might

lie more in the twentieth-century obsession with crotched mahogany than in eighteenth-

century reality. While elaborate tables used in richly decorated interiors certainly

contributed to an overall Rococo aesthetic, people using plain tables in more humble

spaces probably did not tilt their tabletops to display them. Many tables survive whose

tops and tripods were not consciously assembled to fit neatly either into a comer or along

a wall.101 This suggests that for the most part the convenience of the tilting top, which

allowed mobility not only within a room but also up and down stairs and through tight

doorways, outweighed any socio-technic function.

Tilt-top tables were also versatile. As refinement spread throughout British North

America, people used them for numerous forms of polite social interaction. The most

compelling evidence regarding their use is nomenclature. Regularly called “tea tables”

throughout the colonies, they held porcelain, silver, and refined earthenware vessels

associated with tea drinking. This was not, however, their only use. As evidence, we can

use visual sources that include tilt-top tables, especially conversation pieces painted by

British artists including John Joseph Zoffany, Francis Hayman, and Arthur Devis. Such

group portraits in interior spaces reached the height of their popularity in the 1730s and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1740s, precisely when tilt-top tables came to the colonies from Britain. Unfortunately,

American portraitists did not often paint large-group portraits, leaving few visual

documents of American families and their tables. Eventhough the British images portray

elite figures, American colonists looked to the British gentry for their cultural cues and

probably used their tilt-top tables much like their counterparts in England. The shared

culture between the British and their North American colonials and the temporal

correlation between the popularity of conversation pieces and the appearance of tilt-top

tables in the colonies fortify the argument for using the images to investigate how tilt-top

tables were used in America.

Visual images indicate that people used tilt-top tables for a wide array of activities

from business deals to eating to entertaining. People played music around tilt-top tables.

They read to themselves and aloud in groups. Sometimes servants prepared food at tilt-

top tables before carrying it to seated family members (fig. 34). Many paintings

portrayed people playing games at tilt-top tables. For instance, Charles Philips’ painting

A Tea Party• at the Countess o f Portland 5(1732), portrays a large party mingling in an

elaborate tall-ceilinged room with pilasters and niches with statues. To the left of the

hostess, three men sit around a circular table embroiled in a chess game (fig. 35).102

Similarly, in The Rawson Conversation Piece by Gawen Hamilton (c. 1697-1737), an

elderly couple plays cards on a pillar and claw table (fig. 36). A mezzotint called

December , last in a twelve-part series drawn by Robert Dighton (1752-1814) in London

(1784), portrays a woman at a tilt-top table with playing cards strewn about as if her

partner had just left (fig. 37).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a b

Figure 34. Tea canister. The image transfer-printed on side (a) of this tall porcelain tea canister illustrates a servant working at a relatively plain tilt-top table preparing a tea tray to serve to the fashionable couple on side (b) seated in front o f a more elaborate tilt-top table with twisting pillar and lobed top. The images, popularly known as “Maid and Page No. 2” and “Teaparty No. 2,” were probably taken from the engravings by Robert Hancock, London, c.1770. Soft-paste porcelain, Worcester Factory, England, 1770-1775. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift o f Henry Francis du Pont, 1958.719a, b.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 35. Tea Party at the Countess Portland’s. Charles Philips, 1732. On the left, three men sit around a tilt-top table supporting a chessboard. From Ralph Edwards, Early Conversation Pictures from about the Middle Ages to about (London: 1730 Country Life Limited, 1954), 132, fig. 94.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 36. The Rawson Conversation Piece. Gawen Hamilton, c. 1697-1737. This painting illustrates people playing cards at a tilt-top table. From Leger Galleries, ‘"Realism through Informality: The Conversation Piece in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Works by Joseph Wright of Derby A.R.A. from the Descendants of the Artist” (London: Leger Galleries, 1983), fig. 1.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 37. December. Drawn by Robert Dighton (b. 1752-d. 1814), printed and sold by Carington Bowles (d.1793), London, June 24, 1784. This mezzotint demonstrates that people used tilt-top tables for playing cards and reading. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum, gift of Henry Francis du Pont, 1964.892.12.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Visual images indicate not only that people used tilt-top tables for many activities

but also that both men and women used them. Most commonly they appeared as

centerpieces in large family groups of mixed gender. Francis Hayman’s painting of the

Gascoigne Family (c.1740) typifies that genre (fig. 38). Four women and three men are

gathered, some in chairs and others standing, to drink tea and pose for posterity. In some

images, the parties were much larger and the tilt-top table was one among many.103

Artists also portrayed tilt-top tables among groups of the same gender. A painting by an

unidentified English artist (c.1750) presents a mother embroidering with her two

daughters around a small tilt-top table with a burning candle. This not only portrays an

all-female assemblage of users but it also suggests the validity of the term “candlestand”

(fig. 39).104 Portraying male users, Cornelius Troost painted Jeronimus Tonneman and

his Son (1736) playing the flute around a tilt-top table (fig. 40). Other artists portrayed

groups of men conducting business transactions around tilt-top tables in personal offices

and public taverns and clubs. John Thomas Seton, for instance, painted William

Fullerton and Captain Lowis Taking Winein 1773, in which two men appear in serious

discourse seated in late-Baroque style chairs around a circular tilt-top table (fig. 41).

These images demonstrate that tilt-top tables accommodated the needs of varied people in

many capacities. In other words, they were versatile with respect to both space and use.

For the most part, however, eighteenth-century Americans reserved the use of tilt-

top tables for polite discourse because their surface and shape made them the ideal

location for genteel social interaction. Rodris Roth’s 1964 article, “Tea Drinking in 18th-

Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage,” may be begging for an update, but it

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 38. The Gascoigne Family. Francis Hayman, c. 1740. In this painting, as in many other conversation pieces, the tilt-top table serves as a visual anchor tying the family members to their domestic circle. From Brian Allen, Francis Hayman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 28, fig. 9.

100

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 39. A Woman Embroidering with her two Daughters. Unknown, English, c.1750. In this painting, an all-female group gathers around a candlestand. From Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey o f the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 108, fig. 69.

101

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 40. Jeronimus Tonneman and his Son. Cornelius Troost, 1736. In this painting, an all-male group gathers around a central pedestal table for music and reading. From Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey o f the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 261, fig. 323.

102

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 41. William Fullerton and Captain Lowis Taking Wine. John Thomas Seton, 1773. Two men meet at a tilt-top table to drink wine and perhaps to conduct business. From Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 247, fig. 264.

103

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. allows us to reasonably imagine a social tea party employing a tilt-top table.105 In a

wealthy household, the event probably began with a slave or servant wheeling or carrying

the table out from the wall or comer and securing the top in a horizontal position. In

some cases, the table may have already been in the center o f the room where it

permanently displayed tea wares.106 In houses of middling means, the table may have

been the only table in the parlor and rather than wheeling it out the hostess cleared off her

needlework, reading, or other clutter of everyday life to make room for the tea

paraphernalia. The hostess (for women reigned over tea parties) made the tea at the table.

She measured the tea leaves from the tea canister, poured them into the tea pot, and

infused them with boiling water. While women of modest means might have kept a

kettle of water hanging in the hearth to infuse and dilute the tea and later to rinse the

cups, a wealthy lady may have kept a heated tea kettle on a separate kettle stand next to

her. Some ladies may have had kettle stands that matched their tea tables.107

The hostess sat at the table at an accessible but probably not central location in the

room, near a comer or the mantle.108 Guests migrated about the room, sitting or standing,

depending on the size of the room and the crowd, but they always returned to the hostess

at the tea table to refill their cups. While there was other furniture in the room—often

card tables and chairs—the tea table held central importance because tea parties revolved

around ritualized giving and receiving. The French Prince de Broglie noted that inviting

a stranger to tea was the “greatest mark of courtesy” on the part of American colonials.109

Not only did guests receive tea and cakes, but people also talked, shared music, good

will, and perhaps a card game. Ultimately, the exchange of a teacup from a hostess to a

104

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. guest represented an interpersonal exchange of refinement for which the tilt-top tea table

was a symbolic site.

By owning and using a tilt-top table, a person consciously differentiated genteel

surfaces from work surfaces. The smooth and shiny tabletop contrasted starkly with the

surfaces of everyday life: uneven dirt or cobblestone roads, gritty wood floors, and

windowsills that collected the grime of the world outside. Whether mahogany, walnut, or

maple, a table’s expanse of smoothness differentiated it from utilitarian tabletops and

quotidian work. Its circular shape even further separated it from utilitarian tables, which

were most commonly rectangular.

Indeed, their circular shape may have influenced people to reserve tilt-top tables

for refined social exchange. Historians have argued that fashionable dining favored

circular tables because they encouraged conversation. Rectangular tables had

confrontational comers and they imposed status-conscious hierarchies onto sitters.

Circular tables, on the other hand, provided spatial parity. No one dominated from the

head of the table and no one sat below the salt. As Cary Carson has written, genteel

diners or tea drinkers formed a “closed circle of men and women whose shared

commitment to the arts of civility outweighed any real differences in their rank.” Also,

the pedestal under the tabletop allowed freedom in chair arrangement. Without

traditional table legs delineating the proper location for chairs, people could sit anywhere

around its circumference. They could be close to the table near the food, or farther away

with their legs elegantly crossed or their silk brocaded skirt on full display. They could

rub elbows with their beloved or maintain a comfortable distance from someone they

105

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. disliked. The host or hostess could add extra chairs, and guests could leave the party

without disrupting the seating arrangement. By allowing people to comfortably arrange

themselves and inter-mingle, tilt-top tables facilitated fashionable social exchange.110

Tilt-top tables also encouraged the theatricality inherent in genteel society.

Carson emphasized the performative nature of refinement by reminding us that tea parties

and prescription balls “involved real win-or-lose tests of social skills, not merely the

repetition of symbolic formulas.” People had to react to unpredictable events with

simultaneous spontaneity and grace. As a primary location for such social performances,

the tilt-top table became a stage on which individuals started from equal positions in the

group and proved themselves by way of their clever improvisational verbal repartees,

their attractive and proper posture and silver spoon handling, and their appropriate and

timely responses to cues from the performance director: the host or hostess. For this

genre of social theater, tilt-top tables made the perfect stage. Their surfaces differentiated

them from the everyday and their shape accommodated the ever-changing cast of

characters performing in parlors throughout the North American British colonies.” 1

While neighbors with disparate financial resources may have bought different

tables, they used them in much the same way. For example, in Philadelphia, Michael and

Miriam Gratz bought their table with highly carved knees, fluted compressed-ball pillar,

and scalloped top in 1769, around the same time as other consumers with less money

were buying tables of the same size but with un-carved knees, un-fluted compressed-ball

pillars, and plain tops.112 The differences in decoration, however, hardly changed their

function. Both the Gratzes and families with plainer tables entertained in the same

106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. refined manner. Even if the Gratzes wore silk and used porcelain and silver salvers,

while less wealthy families wore linen and used tin-glazed earthenware, the purpose

remained the same. People bought tilt-top tables in order to participate in genteel

theatricality and communicate in the fashionable material language that increasingly

dominated their world.

Succeeding in fashionable parlor culture required delicate personal balances of

intangible virtues like taste, manners, and sensibility. Improper etiquette could endanger

one’s reputation as well as the genteel atmosphere of the party. Tilt-top tables were

equally fragile and they serve as an analog for parlor refinement. Many were neither

stable nor sturdy. Pintels became loose over time. Catch plates moved with the

shrinkage of the wood and stopped meeting the catch securely. Resting an elbow or

placing a heavy object too near the edge of the top could have caused it to wobble or tip

bringing embarrassment or damage to expensive porcelain or silver. Using the tilt-top

table—just like performing in the fashionable rituals of social gatherings—felt precarious

and uncertain.113

Also, tables broke rather easily. Cabinetmakers’ account books are littered with

records reading “Mending a tea table with a new Cap & Snap,” and “Mending a Tea

Table New Pillar.”114 To move a table around a room, one or two people probably lifted

it from the top. The weight of the pillar and tripod placed stress on the pintels and the

block or box. After some years of being lifted from the tops, depending on how well they

were constructed, the boxes and blocks tended to break. They also broke if the table

toppled over, a catastrophe sometimes illustrated in satirical prints that correlate the

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. instability of tilt-top tables with the instability of fashionable society. James Gilray

produced a hand-colored engraving in 1802 of a tilt-top table violently falling to the floor

flinging ceramics and hot tea into the laps of two ladies and a man. His print used the

toppling table as an analogy for the volatility of fashionable performance.1'' The

tumbling table not only shattered ceramics and the table itself, but it also shattered the

well-choreographed construction of order and refinement in the parlor. In many ways,

pleasant evening tea parties hung in the balance of wobbly tabletops on tripods. The

tables’ precariousness enhanced the unpredictability—and perhaps some of the

excitement—of social performance that people throughout the British North American

colonies were embracing in the mid-eighteenth century.

Tilt-top tables became so closely associated with genteel behavior that they may

have become symbols of refinement itself. While group portraits suggest how people

used tilt-top tables, they seldom portray entirely accurate depictions of everyday life.

Scholars have demonstrated that professional painters frequently created imaginary

settings for their sitters, and often reused the same backgrounds and props.116 This was

the case for many portraits that included tilt-top tables. For instance, Arthur Devis

probably used the same tilt-top table for a model in his portraits of Elizabeth Hemyng (c.

1745-47) and Alicia Maria Carpenter, Countess of Egremont (c. 1745), which he painted

within two years of each other.117 Both portraits feature a woman in the center of the

canvas, a decorative mantle to the right, and a tilt-top table in front of it. While the

compositions differ somewhat, both tables have plain flaring pillars with the bottom

block of the box peeking out from under the plain top.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The fact that painters like Devis used tilt-top tables as props suggests their

symbolic meaning. If tilt-top tables were used widely as generic components in the

elaborate stage sets that represented the refinement of Britain’s elite in their family

portraits, then they must have carried significant cultural meaning. If painters repeatedly

chose tilt-top tables as the prop that would most likely appeal to the majority of their

wealthy sitters, then the tables must have held widespread appeal as symbols of genteel

social stature. Tilt-top tables symbolized refinement. Furthermore, their inclusion in so

many conversation piece portraits probably compounded their symbolic meaning. The

more people who saw them included in the painted scenes of elite refinement, the more

people associated them with polite society. In short, anyone looking at British elite

behavior between 1730 and 1750, would have associated tilt-top tables with refinement.

American colonists did precisely that. Not surprisingly, records suggest that tilt-

top tables became symbols of refinement in America as in England. In newspaper

advertisements and articles, the term “tea table” was frequently used as a metonym for

genteel society itself. A Philadelphia advertisement for “so very neat” pewter tea wares

began “To all Lovers of Decency, Neatness and Tea-Table DECORUM.”118 Not “tea-

time” or “tea-party,” but “tea-table decorum.” Similarly, other advertisements for

imported stoneware and porcelain suggested that consumers purchase “blue and white tea

table setts” or “a genteel tea table sett.”119 Rather than being “tea sets” or “tea drinking

vessels” they were described as being o f the table, rather than of the ritual itself. The

table denoted the act of tea drinking, identifying it not by a specific time, nor a type of

event, but a location marked in space by the table.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Quite often tilt-top tables symbolized a distinctively female element of

refinement. Even though in reality both genders used them for many different activities,

their symbolic connection with tea and refinement was also a symbolic connection with

women. David S. Shields demonstrated that when social tea drinking came into the home

as a reaction against the masculine embrace of coffee it became the mainstay of a “new

female gentility.”120 Since women were connected to tea, and tea was connected to tilt-

top tables, the tables frequently became connected with women. For instance, a portrait

of the Carter Family (c. 1740) portrays two men walking into a room through a door on

the left, and three women on the right, one at the harpsichord, one facing the men, and an

older woman at a tilt-top table laden with porcelain tea vessels on a silver tray (fig. 42).

Compositionally, the men are connected to the exterior world through the open door and

the women are connected to the domestic interior through the table, thus suggesting the

table’s refined feminine identity. In literature and print culture, too, the “tea table”

became feminized. Phrases like “tea-table conference” and “tea-table discussion”

appeared in story titles, texts, and advertisements to succinctly denote polite female

interaction.121 Like the ceramic “tea-table setts,” these phrases used “tea table” to

identify refinement—in this case, female refinement—by its location.

Tea tables also represented a negative over-indulgent facet of female

fashionability. To male artists and writers, they symbolically marked the location of

ladies’ vindictive gossip. The frequent devolution of women’s social gatherings into

chatting sessions about scandal and flirtation was often satirized. John Adams wrote to

the New-England Weekly Journal under a pseudonym in 1727, “If you visit the Tea-Table

110

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 42. The Carter Family. Unknown, English, c.1750. Compositionally, the two men are connected to the exterior world through the open door and the women are connected to the domestic interior through the tilt-top table, tea wares, and harpsichord. From Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey o f the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 106. fig. 67.

I l l

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of some few Ladies,... it is very well if you escape hearing a long Roll of your

Neighbor’s Fault’s, which either are not true, or if so would better be buried in

Silence.”122 He and other commentators linked the ladies’ inappropriate or uninteresting

conversation to the table, further imbuing the table with a female identity, which in this

case, was quite unappealing.123 Shields argued that men criticized ladies’ tea table

culture because it threatened their autonomy in the public sphere. Social performance

around the tea table removed women from the purely domestic realm and allowed

them—in fact encouraged them— to converse intelligently with men about cultural trends

and events. Tilt-top tables were especially guilty of this encouragement because of their

circular shape and versatile form. In a group of mixed company sitting around a tilt-top

table, women held equal status as men and could exert their personal power through the

same channels as men, namely meaningful conversation over popular refreshments. This

may have made tilt-top tables threatening to some men but desirable to some women.124

Towards the end of the eighteenth century in America, the direct connection

between tilt-top tables and tea may have dissolved. Over time, their tea-related

association with women—both pleasantly engaging and disagreeably nasty—may have

developed into a more comprehensive symbolism of female domesticity, as suggested by

two needlework pictures made by Prudence Punderson of Preston, Connecticut. One

pictures a woman sitting in a rush-bottom Late Baroque-style chair with a book and fruit

on a tilt-top table with a baluster pillar next to her (c. 1770-80) (fig. 43). This image

places the tilt-top table in the refined female domestic realm in two ways. First, the table

accompanies a woman sitting at home, and second, it appears in a picture intended to

112

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 43. Needlework. Prudence Punderson, Preston, Connecticut, c. 1770-80. This needlework image places the tilt-top table in a refined female domestic realm. From Edgar deN. Mayhew and Minor Myers, Jr., A Documentary History o f American Interiors From the Colonial Era to 1915, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), 40.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. demonstrate Punderson’s artistic needlework skills. Not only does the picture portray her

conception of refinement, but its mode of production demonstrates it.I2;>

In another needlework image often called “The First, Second, and Last Scene of

Mortality” (c. 1774-1784), Punderson depicted three distinct stages of life—infancy,

womanhood, and death (fig. 44).126 On the right, a nurse tends to a baby in a cradle, and

on the left a mirror draped in mourning cloth accompanies a dark coffin. In the center, a

woman draws a floral pattern on paper on a tilt-top table similar to the one in the first

image. Just as the cradle represents infancy and the coffin represents death, the tilt-top

table represents adult womanhood. It is the anchor of her parlor, her command post from

which she cultivates and oversees the proper polite behavior of her family. She sits

behind it just like so many women in conversation piece paintings. But in addition to

being a prop for her status and laudable manners, the tilt-top table also communicates her

stage in life. It acts as a visual cue to represent the years of refined domestic living that

follow childhood and precede death.

Punderson’s images may suggest a subtle shift in the symbolic meaning of tilt-top

tables from the time of Devis and John Adams. Less the site of genteel entertainment

where women charmed, bored, or challenged their male guests, Punderson’s tables are

more broadly symbols of women in the home representing the day-to-day experiences of

adult women more than celebrated moments of social performance. Of course, one

woman’s work can not confirm such a wide cultural change, but it has been suggested

that Punderson copied the composition for “The First, Second, and Last Scene of

Mortality” from a print source, intimating that the association between tables and

114

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 44. The First, Second, and Last Scene o f Mortality. Needlework, silk thread on satin. Prudence Punderson, Preston, Connecticut, c. 1774-1784. Just as the cradle represents infancy and the coffin represents death, the tilt-top table represents adult womanhood. From Edgar deN. Mayhew and Minor Myers, Jr., A Documentary History o f American Interiors From the Colonial Era to, (New1915 York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), plate 2.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. domestic adulthood may have been more widespread.127

The broadening of the symbolic meaning associated with tilt-top tables bolsters

the idea that as Americans accommodated and absorbed refinement over the course of the

eighteenth century it became increasingly domesticated. As Richard L. Bushman has

argued, people longing to join the widening crowd of middling respectability refined

more aspects of their lives and therefore more areas of their houses. In this process,

women became the center of a refined domestic environment. Their lives became a

performance of genteel household management, from the entertainment of guests to the

education of the children. Tilt-top tables may have been especially desirable to these

consumers and users not only because their versatility served practical as well as social

needs, but also because their symbolism succinctly announced the refined domesticity of

the hostess and her household to guests and strangers.128

Finding Cultural Meaning

In seeking to better understand the people who made and used tilt-top tables, I

have explored the roles of the key players. Makers exchanged tilt-top table parts and

specialized services like carving and turning in order to market more tables more

profitably. Distributors included tilt-top tables among their merchandise that people

desired to use in genteel social events. As a result, buyers could choose among different

types of wood and different decorative features to control the appearance and price of

their tables. People with tilt-top tables in their homes generally used them for occasions

of polite interaction with which they became so closely associated that Americans made

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. them symbols of domestic refinement itself.

From these conclusions, we can begin to draw out larger cultural meanings that

contribute to scholarship about the British North Atlantic World. Most significantly, the

appearance and popular use of tilt-top tables illuminates the trajectory of a single new

commodity in the consumer market that confirms patterns of consumption previously

recognized by scholars. In his essay, “The Consumer Revolution in British North

America: Why Demand?,” Carson put forth a hypothesis about how people used objects

to communicate in a changing world.

In a world in motion, migrants and travelers needed a standardized system of social communications. They required a set of conventions they could carry with them that signified anywhere they went the status they enjoyed at home. So ordinary people adopted and then adapted to their own various special needs a system of courtly behavior borrowed ultimately from a protocol developed in France and disseminated through Amsterdam and London to provincial England and the colonies. Standardized architectural spaces equipped with fashionable furnishings became universally recognized settings for social performances that were governed by internationally accepted rules of etiquette.129

He recognized that these new products appeared in the 1630s, accelerated throughout the

seventeenth century, and exploded in number in the decades following 1720. The

appearance and popularity of tilt-top tables as commodities corroborates Carson’s

hypothesis. They functioned as “standardized, fashion-bearing consumer goods” that

encouraged and supported genteel interaction and became essential components of the

settings for social performance that ordinary people adopted. By the mid-eighteenth

century, people could travel across the colonies and probably across the British Empire,

see tilt-top tables, and identify their owners as socially respectable. They acted as one

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vocabulary word in a standardized social language, or as one object in the new material

medium of social integration.130

Tilt-top tables may have proliferated in much the same way as creamware and

pearlware, which have been widely recognized as one of refinement’s primary means of

expansion to the middling sort throughout the British Empire. The retailing of tilt-top

tables and these refined earthenwares share significant features. Like Josiah Wedgwood

selling Queensware and Jasperware, retailers offered tilt-top tables with different

decorative options at finely gauged price levels. As Neil McKendrick demonstrated,

Wedgwood cultivated a desire for high-priced goods among consumers of moderate

means and then capitalized on their desire by offering similar but lesser products at lower

prices.131 This sales tactic continued throughout the century and in to the next, as Martin

pointed out in her 2002 article entitled “Magical, Mythical, Practical, and Sublime: The

Meanings and Uses of Ceramics in America.” Before long, consumers could buy

creamware plates with gilded feather edges, or, if they wanted a cheaper version,

identical edges with plain blue glaze.1 j2 Choosing a gilded edge over blue may have been

similar to choosing a scalloped top over a plain top, claw feet over round, or a fluted

pillar over plain. While tilt-top table makers obviously operated on a smaller scale than

the Staffordshire Potteries that shipped ceramics around the world, they shared some of

the same production and marketing strategies. Researching further correlations between

the furniture industry and the ceramics industry might add furniture to the body of

material culture scholarship about consumerism that has been dominated by Josiah

Wedgwood and his fellow Staffordshire potters.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The consumption and use of tilt-top tables may make a unique contribution to our

understanding of how people accepted and accommodated the new refined lifestyle into

their domestic spaces. Scholars studying the standards of living in early America have

argued that people of middling means did not acquire all the objects associated with

gentility at the same time. Rather, people bought genteel items when they could afford

them, and chose the items depending on availability, price, and personal preference. As a

result, people mingled objects of the old fashioned lifestyle with objects of the new.133 A

family might use a desk (a specialized furniture form that delineated space, increased

privacy, and visually denoted wealth) in the same room with a chest (an age-old English

storage form for textiles). In other words, the process of attaining refinement progressed

piecemeal. People embraced new values including privacy, spatial specialization, and

improved hygiene, while still sleeping on straw palettes several to a room and welcoming

guests through doors next to smoky cooking hearths.

Tilt-top tables may have appealed to middling consumers who gradually

embraced refinement because they functioned within both the new and old lifestyles. On

the one hand, owning a tilt-top table allowed people to participate in the increasingly

important ritual of social exchange, demonstrating their knowledge of keys and catch

plates, slop bowls, and tea spoons. On the other hand, tilt-top tables allowed patterns of

the old lifestyle to persist. Just as chairs and tables had been stored until needed against

the walls in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so were tilt-top tables.

Families in small houses who rearranged their furniture quite often depending on the

season or activity at hand. People were accustomed to using the same table for eating as

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for sewing or reading. Because of their versatility, tilt-top tables felt familiar. But they

also looked different, moved differently, and—most importantly—they symbolized a

different lifestyle. In short, they encouraged the new refined theatricality of social

performance, but also accommodated the logistical problems of everyday life in

environments designed more for use than ostentation. They allowed people to integrate

refinement into their conventional living patterns. The proliferation of tilt-top tables not

only supports the argument that average Americans accepted refinement piecemeal, but it

also suggests that as people changed their lifestyles, they continued to manipulate their

interior space in conventional patterns.

In conclusion, I can succinctly answer two questions posed earlier in this study.

Why tilt-top tables? Why at that moment in the 1740s? The terms of trade shifted

favorably toward merchants based in North American cities, providing sufficient capital

to encourage craftsmen to specialize their production and merchants to increase the

volume and geographic breadth of their distribution networks. The entrepreneurs driving

this changing economy embraced tilt-top tables because they could specialize in the

production of specific parts and they could ship them easily and profitably. Hand-in-

hand with this increased supply, demand for genteel consumer goods rose. For

consumers, the tables’ shape and surface encouraged refinement—and symbolized it

eventually—but still proved practical and convenient.

These conclusions about tilt-top tables raise many questions. They open paths of

inquiry many of which could constitute second and third master’s theses. Perhaps the

most tempting direction for future research lies with the makers and distributors. More

120

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vigorous sifting through newspapers from different cities and towns would probably yield

more advertisements for craftsmen and merchants making and selling “tea table

columns,” turned tops, and maybe even legs. Biographical information about those

makers and distributors could begin to construct a much fuller picture of who was making

and selling the tables. How many were chairmakers? turners? aspiring merchants? How

lucrative was making and distributing tilt-top tables? What else did they make and sell?

How and how far did they transport the parts and the whole tables? Shipping records and

pier-side auction announcements and records could also inform this investigation. So

could further examination of extant tables. Measuring turning patterns, for instance,

could identify pillars made in the same shops. Measuring holes in the undersides of tops

could identify tops turned on the same cross and arbor attachment. Linking tables to one

another through construction and carving characteristics could gather groups of related

tables and yield more stories of trans-Atlantic and coastal migration, inter-regional trade,

and the social economies of local production. Ultimately this line of inquiry could

contribute to the current historical interest in the culture and commerce of the greater

Atlantic World.

Another contribution to Atlantic World scholarship might stem from further

investigation of specific centers of tilt-top table production. Although I have emphasized

the similarity between tilt-top tables made in disparate colonial regions, future research

might benefit from looking at difference once again. But rather than seeking solely to

identify different characteristics of tables made in different regions, scholars could

compare and contrast patterns in artisanal work, distribution and retailing, consumption,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and use in different cities and regions. For instance, Boston’s patterns differed. While

Figures 2-10 illustrate that Boston tilt-top tables looked very much like their counterparts

in other cities, in general they tended to have more plain than dished or scalloped tops,

and fewer box mechanisms. And while advertisements for “tea table catches” and

records of round tea tables appeared in Boston in the 1740s and 1750s, just as they did

elsewhere, they seem to have been made in lesser quantity.

Even preliminary investigation into Boston’s economic rhythms and patterns in

production and consumption yields clues to this regional discrepancy. According to

McCusker and Menard, New England never took full advantage o f the “burgeoning

Atlantic economy” in part because the markets for their products grew much slower than

the region’s rapidly increasing population. In particular, the Boston area experienced an

economic depression in the second half of the 1740s after King George’s War.

Throughout the next decades, people in northern New England lived under constant

threat of attack from the French and the Native Americans who periodically launched

violent assaults on British settlements as the crown engaged in territorial wars with

Continental powers. Also by that time, land in southern New England was virtually full,

attracting few new immigrants to infuse the area’s economy. Furthermore, little land was

available to new comers. In short, Boston’s economy lacked the economic opportunity of

Philadelphia or Charleston or New York. Immigrant craftsmen and merchants, those

most likely to launch new business ventures in tilt-top tablemaking, might have been

more attracted to cities that more readily offered economic opportunity. Delving deeper

into similar differences between tilt-top table production, distribution, and consumption

122

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in different cities could help illuminate the economic and cultural forces behind craft

specialization, the development of networks of commercial exchange and proto-industrial

production, and demand for manufactured goods in the eighteenth century.134

Scholarship vacillates like a pendulum. One generation reacts against a

theoretical approach only to watch their children return to it. Scholars writing the

detailed regional furniture studies that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s criticized the

sweeping generalizations found in collections catalogues from the 1960s and

anthropological writings from the 1970s. Their criticism generated detailed stories about

how social, economic, environmental, ethnic, and religious forces impacted the people

who made, sold, bought and used furniture. This counter-reaction immeasurably

improved the way we understand early furniture. But the pendulum should swing back—

at least part way. I have tried to combine detailed regional stories with the larger

historical dialogue about Atlantic commerce, consumerism, refinement, and the domestic

interior environment. Further research could surely strengthen and refine my arguments.

But as a first step toward cross-regional comparison of furniture forms, this study of tilt-

top tables demonstrates the benefits of synthesizing information and integrating detail

and context.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ENDNOTES

1 William McPherson Homor, Jr., “A Study of American Piecrust Tables,” International Studio 99 (November 1931): 38.

2 Albert Sack, “Regionalism in Early American Tea Tables,” Antiques 131 (January 1987): 248-263.

3 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth o f a Consumer Society’: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982); David Hancock, Citizens o f the World: London Merchants and Integration o f the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Cary Carson, “The Consumer Revolution in British North America: Why Demand?,” Of Consuming Interests: The Style o f Life in the Eighteenth- Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, Peter J Albert (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 483-697; Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 1 (January 1988): 135-143; Kevin M. Sweeney, “Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield, Connecticut, 1639-1800,” Material Culture in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 261-290; Gloria L. Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England, 1640- 1773,” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 1 (January 1988): 124-134.

4 Charles F. Montgomery, “Regional Preferences and Characteristics in American Decorative Arts: 1750-1800,” American Art: 1750-1800 Towards Independence, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Patricia E. Kane (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery; London: The Victoria and Albert Museum, 1976), 58-61.

5 For instance see John T. Kirk, American Furniture & The British Tradition to 1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 3.

6 Benjamin A. Hewitt, Patricia E. Kane, Gerald W. R. Ward, The Work o f Many Hands: Card Tables in Federal America 1790-1820 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982).

7 Henry Glassie argued that “sophisticated generalizing theories” can help us understand the lives of those whom history excludes by connecting them to the people whose daily

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lives we can identify and know through documentary and material records. Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis o f Historic Artifacts (Knoxville, Tenn.: The University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 10.

8 Jack L. Lindsey,Worldly Goods: The Arts o f Early Pennsylvania, 1680-1758 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999), 151.

9 Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture 1680-1830, The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (Williamsburg, Va.: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 320.

10 Hurst and Prown, Southern Furniture, 318.

11 Ronald L. Hurst, “Cabinetmakers and Related Tradesmen in Norfolk, Virginia, 1770- 1820” (master’s thesis, College of William and Mary, 1989), 10, 15.

12 For further discussion of the transferal of furniture forms from rural England to America see Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture 1630-1730, An Interpretive Catalog (New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Winterthur, Del.: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1988), 56; also see Carr and Walsh, “The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” 139; for furniture traditions moving between American towns see Hurst, “Cabinetmakers and Related Tradesmen in Norfolk,” 19-20.

13 John Bivins, Jr., “Rhode Island Influence in the Work of Two North Carolina Cabinetmakers,” American Furniture 1999, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 79-80.

14 John Bivins, Jr., “A Catalog of Northern Furniture with Southern Provenances,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative 15,Arts no. 2 (May 1989): 61.

15 Philip Zea, “Furniture,” The Great River: Art and Society> of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820, eds. Gerald W. R. Ward and William N. Hosley, Jr. (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985), 243.

16 For Braxton’s table see John Bivins and Forsyth Alexander,The Regional Arts o f the Early South: A Sampling from the Collection o f the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts; Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 32.

17 For Goodwin’s table see Brock Jobe and Myma Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984), 298-299.

125

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 Philip Zimmerman, “Workmanship as Evidence: A Model for Object Study,” Winterthur Portfolio 16, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 283-307.

19 Ralph Edwards and Percy Macquoid,The Dictionary o f English Furniture from the Middle Ages to the Late Georgian Period (London: Country Life Limited, 1924-7; Rev. ed., 1954; Reprint, Revised and Enlarged by Ralph Edwards, London: Barra Books Ltd., 1983), 3:145-154.

20 Hurst and Prown, Southern Furniture, 313.

21 For a succinct discussion of English names for tilt-top tables see Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans,New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Winterthur, Del.: H. F. du Pont Winterthur Museum; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), 274 n. 1.

22 For a succinct discussion of early rectangular tea tables in America see David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff, eds., American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 37.

23 Edwards, Dictionary, 3:203-8; William H. Ukers, All about Tea (New York: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935), 389, 402.

24 E. Milby Burton, Charleston Furniture, 1700-1825 (Narberth, Pa.: The Livingston Publishing Company for The Charleston Museum, 1955), 49; Lindsey, Worldly Goods, 151; Sweeney, “Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield,” 277; David L. Barquist,American Tables and Looking Glasses in the Mabel Brady Garvan and other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1992), 232; Elizabeth Adams Rhoades, “Household Furnishings in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1750-1775” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1972), 41; William McPherson Homor, Jr., Blue Book, Philadelphia Furniture. William Penn to George Washington (Philadelphia, 1935), 143.

25 Lindsey, Worldly Goods, 150-151; For a tilt-top table with a pseudo-triangular platform see The Magazine Antiques 94, no. 6 (December 1968): 827. A cabinet-pillar table and a kettle stand from Newport with pseudo-triangular platform bases are at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1958.2145 and 1959.2648. See Richards and Evans, New England Furniture, 287-88, 278-79.

26 While Clement Conger and Alexandra Rollins suggested that this table could have been made as early as 1735, Jack Lindsey adjusted its date span to the more likely date of 1748-55. See Clement E. Conger and Alexandra W. Rollins, Treasures o f State: Fine

126

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms o f the U.S. Department of State (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), 81; Also see Lindsey,Worldly Goods, 154.

27 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy o f British North America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1985), 60-68, 268-269. Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,” 617.

28 Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,” 487, 513; McKendrick et. al., The Birth o f a Consumer Society, 9-33, 14.

29 Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,”487-488, 494, 504; McKendrick et. al., The Birth o f a Consumer Society, 9; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement o f America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 28-29, 183-86; Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England,” 127; Sweeney, “Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield,” 276.

30 Carr and Walsh, “The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” 137; Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England,” 127.

31 Ann Smart Martin, “Makers, Buyers, and Users: Consumerism as a Material Culture Framework,” Winterthur Portfolio 28, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1993): 142, 144.

32 The Great River: Art and Society o f the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820, eds. Gerald W. R. Ward and William N. Hosley, Jr. (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985), 225-6; also see Hurst and Prown, Southern Furniture, 320-325.

33 Patricia E. Kane, “The Palladian Style in Rhode Island Furniture: Fly Tea Tables,” American Furniture 1999, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999): 7-9.

34 Ibid., 6-7.

35 See Christopher P. Monkhouse and Thomas S. Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House (Providence, R.I.: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1986), 136.

36 For additional spherical balls see Flanigan, American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection, 42; Barquist, American Tables and Looking Glasses, 245, cat. 131; for additional compressed balls see Morrison H. Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum o f Art II: Late Colonial Period: The Queen Anne and Chippendale Styles (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Random House, Inc., 1985), 192, cat. 121, and 193, cat. 123; Winterthur Museum, 1960.1061, 1959.3405, 1959.3383.

127

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 Charles F. Hummel, With Hammer in Hand (Winterthur, Del.: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; Charlottesville, Va.: The University of Virginia Press, 1968), 90.

38 See Kane, “The Palladian Style,” 15 n. 8; also see Luke Beckerdite, “Immigrant Carvers and the Development of the Rococo Style in New York, 1750-70,” American Furniture 1996, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996), 251.

39 Conversation with Michael S. Podmaniczky, June 2001.

40 For instance, see a small table at the Winterthur Museum, 1956.38.147.

41 Conversation with Michael S. Podmaniczky, June 2001.

42 For other flat plain legs see Dean A. Fales, Jr., Essex County’ Furniture: Documented Treasures from Local Collections 1660-1860 (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1965), no. 13; also see Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 336-37.

43 For instance, see Winterthur Museum, 1956.38.90.

44 For other tables with leaf-decorated feet see Burton, Charleston Furniture, fig. 132; Winterthur Museum, Decorative Arts Photographic Collection, 91.537; Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, 370.

4:> For similar feet see Kane, “The Palladian Style,” figs. 6 and 7.

46 For another example of low-relief C-scrolls see Beckerdite, “Immigrant Carvers,” 251.

47 For an example from Philadelphia see Rodriguez Roque,American Furniture at Chipstone, 312.

48 Conversation with Wallace Gusler, October 2001.

49 Homor, Blue Book, 142; Christopher Gilbert, The Life and Work o f Thomas Chippendale, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), 1:130; Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum, 190; Richards and Evans, New England Furniture, 218; also see Barquist, American Tables and Looking Glasses, 232; also see Conger and Rollins, Treasures o f State, 107.

128

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 For discussions of craft specialization see James M. Gaynor and Nancy L. Hagedom, Tools: Working Wood in Eighteenth-Century America(Williamsburg, Va.: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1993), 40-41; Mack Headley, “Eighteenth-Century Cabinetshops and the Furniture-Making Trade in Newport, Rhode Island,” American Furniture 1999, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 17, 18, 25, 34; Brock Jobe, “The Boston Furniture Industry 1720-40,” Boston Furniture o f the Eighteenth-Centurv (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts; Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1974), 47; Brock Jobe,Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993), 37, 55; Jeanne Vibert Sloane, “John Cahoone and the Newport Furniture Industry,” Old-Time New England, New England Furniture, Essays in Memory o f Benno M. Forman, ed. Brock Jobe (Boston: The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1987), 89-93; McCusker and Menard, The Economy o f British North America, 270.

51 As reprinted in Alfred Coxe Prime, The Arts & Crafts in Philadelphia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1721-1785 (Boston: The Walpole Society, 1929), 187;The South- Carolina Gazette, February 7, 1735/36, April 16, 1737, and April 24, 1742, as reprinted in John Bivins, Jr., The Furniture o f Coastal North Carolina, 1700-1820 (Winston- Salem, N.C.: The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts; Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University o f North Carolina Press, 1988), 95;The South Carolina Gazette & County Advertiser, March 24, 1767, as reprinted in Prime,The Arts & Crafts in Philadelphia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 160.

~2 J. Stewart Johnson, “New York Cabinetmaking prior to the Revolution” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1964), 28; Barquist,American Tables and Looking Glasses, 232; The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 30, 1751, Accessible Archives, available from http://srch.accessible.com/search/search.pl, item 13033, accessed November 2001; The New-York Journal of the General Advertiser, December 7, 1769, as reprinted in [Rita Susswein Gottesman], The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1726-1776 (New York: The New-York Historical Society, 1938), 128; “The Thomas Elfe Account Book,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 36, no. 2 (April 1936): 61; ibid., 57;

5j Ward and Hosley, The Great River, 226 n. 3; The Pennsylvania Gazette, December 19, 1771,Accessible Archives, item 50175, accessed November 2001; also see an earlier version of the same advertisement on May 15, 1766, Accessible Archives, item 37944, accessed November 2001.

54 Conversation with Philip Zea, March 2002.

55 For a discussion of how craftsmen negotiated their exchange relationships in individual social economies, see Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Making Furniture in Preindustrial America:

129

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5. For examples of the relationships between less specialized rural artisans in North Carolina see Bivins, The Furniture o f Coastal North Carolina, 60-3.

36 Helena Hayward and Pat Kirkham. William and John Linnell: Eighteenth-Century London Furniture Makers. 2 vols. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1980), 1:171.

3/ Nancy Ann Goyne, “Furniture Craftsmen in Philadelphia, 1760-1780. Their Role in Mercantile Society,” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1963), 215.

co Forman, American Seating Furniture, 242-3, 249; Leigh Keno, Joan Barzilay Freund, and Alan Miller, “’The Very Pink of the Mode’: Boston Georgian Chairs, Their Export, and Their Influence,” American Furniture 1996, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996), 270.

59 Benno M. Forman, “Delaware Valley ‘Crookt Foot’ and Slat-Back Chairs: The Fussell- Savery Connection,” Winterthur Portfolio 15, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 46; for Savery labels see Homor, Blue Book, pis. 88-93;The Pennsylvania Gazette, September 25, 1755, Accessible Archives, item 18764, accessed March 2002.

60 See Figures 2 and 5 and Barquist, American Tables and Looking Glasses, 233.

61 Nancy Goyne Evans,American Windsor Chairs (New York: Hudson Hills Press; Winterthur, Del.: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1996), 65-9.

62 Conversation with Wallace Gusler, October 2001.

63 Beckerdite, “Immigrant Carvers,” 254-5.

54 Martin Eli Weil, “A Cabinetmaker’s Price Book,” Winterthur Portfolio 13, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Harrold E. Gillingham, “Benjamin Lehman, a Germantown Cabinetmaker,” The Pennsylvania Magazine o f Historv and Biography 54, no. 4(1930): 289-306.

65 Weil, “A Cabinetmaker’s Price Book,” 175-192.

66 Gillingham, “Benjamin Lehman,” 289-306. While Gillingham called Lehman a cabinetmaker, William McPherson Homor, Jr. wrote that Lehman was primarily a lumber

130

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dealer and livery stable owner (William McPherson Homor, Jr., “Fancy Versus Facts,” Antiquarian 15, no. 5 [November 1930]: 76, 108, 112).

67 Gaynor and Hagedom, Tools, 41.

68 McCusker and Menard, The Economy o f British North America, 321; for discussion of craftsmen buying hardware see Bivins, The Furniture o f Coastal North Carolina, 88-90; for discussion of milling and buying wood see Cooke, Making Furniture, 30, and Bivins, The Furniture o f Coastal North Carolina, 76-81.

69 Thomas Chippendale,The Gentleman & Cabinet-Maker's Director, 3rd edition, 1762 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), pis. 144-146, 156-7; William Ince and John Mayhew, The Universal System o f Household Furniture, London, 1759 (London: Alec Tiranti Ltd., 1960), pis. 13, 14; Morrison H. Heckscher, “English Furniture Pattern Books in Eighteenth-Century America,” American Furniture 1994, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 174; for an example of pierced legs see Warren et.al.,Bayou Bend Collection, 175.

70 For instance, see Edwards, Dictionary, 3:207.

71 J. Michael Flanigan, American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 42; Gerald. R. W. Ward, ed., with Brock W. Jobe, Thomas S. Michie, Jayne E. Stokes, Robert F. Trent, Anne H. Vogel, Philip D. Zimmerman, American Furniture with Related Decorative Arts, 1660-1830, The Milwaukee Art Museum and The Layton Art Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Layton Art Collection; Rizzoli International Publications, 1991), 178.

/2 The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 22, 1740, reprint of a New York advertisement from May 19, 1740,Accessible Archives, item 3901 [database on-line]; accessed November 2001 .

73 McCusker and Menard, The Economy o f British North America, 71; Neil McKendrick also suggested that distribution contributed significantly to the economy, see McKendrick et. al., The Birth o f a Consumer Society’, 12, 31.

74 Linda Colley,Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 3-6, 55-100; McCusker and Menard, The Economy o f British North America, 80; Richard S. Dunn, “Religion, Politics, and Economics: Pennsylvania in the Atlantic World, 1680-1755,” Worldly Goods: The Arts o f Early Pennsylvania, 1680-1758 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999), 31-32.

131

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 75 McCusker and Menard, The Economy o f British North America, 51.

76 For a discussion of the South Sea Bubble, see Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins o f the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 117-118; also see R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modem World, 6th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1984), 259-263.

77 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman in Familiar Letters, 2 vols. (London: 1727; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1969), 1:2; Colley, Britons, 39-40.

/8 The best work published on distribution in a region other than Newport is Bivins, The Furniture o f Coastal North Carolina and “Rhode Island Influence.”

79 Margaretta M. Lovell, “’Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable,’ The Business of Cabinetmaking in Eighteenth-Century Newport,” Winterthur Portfolio no.26, 1 (Spring 1991): 60; Sloane, “John Cahoone,” 88-93; Mabel Swan, “The Townsends and Goddards,” Antiques 49 (April 1946): 228.

80 Lovell, “’Such Furniture as Will Be Most Profitable,”’ 39-40.

81 Kane, “The Palladian Style,” 1-2.

82 For the British use of “fly table,” see Gilbert, The Life and Work o f Thomas Chippendale, 1:302.

83 Bivins, “Northern Furniture with Southern Provenances,” 61.

84 Hancock, Citizens o f the World, 320-81.

' For lists from both years see Michael Moses, Master Craftsmen o f Newport (New York: Israel Sack, Inc.; Tenafly, N.J.: MMI Americana Press, 1984), 357; for a discussion of inflation in colonial Rhode Island, see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775, a Handbook (Williamsburg, Va.: Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 131-137.

86 I present colonial currency converted into London Sterling in parentheses to allow comparison between the prices in different colonies. Any comparisons of London Sterling prices from different years must, of course, take inflation into account. All converted prices are approximate. All the rates for conversions come from McCusker, Money and Exchange.

132

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 87 Sloane, “John Cahoone,” 106-7.

88Moses, Master Craftsmen o f Newport, 357.

89John J. McCusker, Money’ and Exchange, 153-154.

90 Conger and Rollins wrote that tilt-top tables were cheaper in New York than rectangular tables but they provide no proof. Conger and Rollins, Treasures o f State, 141.

91 Christie’s New York, “Important American Furniture, Silver, Prints, Folk Art, and Decorative Arts,” January 27, 1996, lot 247, 130-1; Nicholas B. Wainwright, Colonial Grandeur in Philadelphia, The House and Furniture of General John Cadwalader (Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1964), 44.

92 Martha Willoughby, “The Accounts of Job Townsend, Jr.,” American Furniture 1999, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 109-161.

93 Equivalents in London Sterling are unavailable for these prices because Rhode Island abandoned its inflated paper currency in 1763 in favor of the rates used in Massachusetts. Townsend, however, appears still to be recording inflated currency six years later. McCusker, Money and Exchange, 135-6.

94 See Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum, 202-3.

95 Wainwright, Colonial Grandeur, 62; Richards and Evans, New England Furniture, 74; Calculations for Washington’s ceramics are based on the appendices in Susan Gray Detweiler, George Washington's Chinaware (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1982), 200-1, and the Providence Price list of 1757 (see Table 2).

96 For Philadelphia price list see Table 1; for other prices see Table 1, “Average Monthly Wholesale Prices of Commodities in Philadelphia, 1772,” in Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, Miriam Hussey,Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1935), 412.

97 For Gavet table see Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum o f Fine Arts Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), 141-2; for other prices see Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700-1861: Statistical Supplement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 76-79.

98Jonathan Prown and Richard Miller, “The Rococo, The Grotto, and the Philadelphia High Chest,” American Furniture 1996, ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee, Wis.: The

133

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996); see also Bivins, The Furniture o f Coastal North Carolina, 3.

99 For a German table with foldable frame see Alexander Schopp,Alte Deutsche Bauemstuben und Hausrat (Elberfeld: Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1921), 20; for an English gate-leg table, see Edwards, Dictionary\ 3:218; for a French table with folding leaves see Paul Hartmann, ed. Le Meuble Leger en France (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1952), fig. 6; Barquist,American Tables and Looking Glasses, 232.

100 The term “socio-technic” comes from Lewis Binford, An Archaeological Perspective (New York: Seminar Press, 1972) as cited in Stacia G. Gregory, “The Elements of Consumption: Tea and Table Wares in Baltimore County, Maryland Before and After the Revolution,” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1987), 5.

101 Barquist,American Tables and Looking Glasses, 232.

102 Also see Philips’ painting, “Algernon, 7th Duke of Somerset, With His Family,” in Edwards, Early Conversation Pictures, frontispiece.

103 For instance, see “The Wollaston Family” by William Hogarth in Edwards, Early Conversation Pictures, 126.

I 04 See “A Woman Embroidering with her Two Daughters,” in Mario Praz, Conversation Pieces: A Survey> of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), 108, fig. 69; for another example of women around a tilt-top table see “Two Ladies Seated at a Table,” by an unknown English painter, c.1765, in “An Exhibition of English Conversation Pieces of the Eighteenth Century,” (Detroit, Mich.: The Detroit Institute o f Arts, 1948), 11.

105 Rodris Roth, “Tea Drinking in 18th-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage,” Paper 14, Contributions from the Museum o f History’ and Technology, United States National Museum Bulletin 225 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1961), 61-91.

106 Some probate inventories list tea tables and tea wares in succession, suggesting physical proximity. For instance, the 1760 inventory of Samuel White of Brookline. Massachusetts listed “Tea Table Kittle Pot, Cups&Sausers” in the “East lower room.” Similarly, the inventory of Jonathan Bill, a yeoman in Chelsea, Massachusetts, listed “Tea table saucers cups Salt Cellar” on the same line in the “East Room.” See Abbott Lowell Cummings, Rural Household Inventories: Establishing the Names, Uses and Furnishings o f Rooms in the Colonial New England Home, 1675-1775 (Boston: The Society for the Preservation for New England Antiquities, 1964), 170, 185; also see Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum, 190.

134

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107 The only known surviving pair of a table and similar stand are attributed to Peter Scott of Williamsburg, Virginia. The tilt-top table is at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, N.C., see Bivins and Alexander, The Regional Arts o f the Early South, 32; the stand is in a private collection.

108 See illustration and discussion in Roth, “Tea Drinking in 18th-Century America,” 76- 77.

109 Roth, “Tea Drinking in 18th-Century America,” 72.

110 Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,” 591; Ann Smart Martin, “Tea Tables Turned Over: Social Practice and Consumer Demand in Pre-Revolutionary America” (paper presented at the annual Furniture Forum, “A Passion for Rococo: The Chippendale Style Then and Now,” Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Del., March 2002).

111 Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,” 586.

112 For the Gratz table now in the Kaufman collection, see Rodriguez Roque, American Furniture at Chipstone, 312; for plain Philadelphia tables see Figure 13.

113 Bushman, The Refinement o f America, 16, 83, 185; David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Williamsburg, Va.: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xxvi-ii.

114 Joshua Delaplaine’s account with John Man, 1754, as reprinted in J. Stewart Johnson, “New York Cabinetmaking prior to the Revolution,” master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1964, app. I; Thomas Elfe’s account with Downs & Lee, December 19, 1772, as reprinted in “Thomas Elfe’s Account Book,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 37, no. 3 (July 1936): 111.

115 Ann Smart Martin, “Magical, Mythical, Practical, and Sublime: The Meanings and Uses of Ceramics in America,” Ceramics in America 2002, ed. Robert Hunter (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Chipstone Foundation; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002), 43-44.

116 For a discussion of props used in British conversation pieces see Ellen G. D’Oench, The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis & his Contemporaries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art, 1980), 50; Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1993), 71; for a discussion of props in American portraiture see Margaretta M. Lovell, “Mrs. Sargent, Mr. Copley, and the Empirical Eye,” Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 21-28.

135

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 117 Photograph Archive, Yale Center for British Art, negative 204564; D’Oench, The Conversation Piece, fig. 14.

118 The Pennsylvania Gazette, March 15, 1733, Accessible Archives, item 1225, accessed November 2001.

119 The Pennsylvania Gazette, April 18, 1771,Accessible Archives, item 48630, accessed November 2001; The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 25, 1769,Accessible Archives, item 44688, accessed November 2001.

120 Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, 113.

121 For instance, see an advertisement for Father Abraham's Almanac that includes a story called “The Conclusion of the Dialogue at a Tea Table Conference between two Ladies of Fashion.” The Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept 15, 1768,Accessible Archives, item 43250, accessed November 2001.

122 As quoted in Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, 105-6.

123 For a discussion of the criticism against female gentility see Bushman, The Refinement o f America, 187-97.

124 Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, 100-120.

123 Ward and Hosley, The Great River, 402-3; Betty Ring, Girlhood Embroidery v American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework, 1650-1850, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 1:13-20.

126 For additional publications of this needlework picture see Harold L. Peterson, Americans at Home from the Colonists to the Late Victorians: A Pictorial Source Book of American Domestic Interiors with an Appendix on Inns and Taverns(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pi. 6; also see Barquist,American Tables and Looking Glasses, 32.

127 Barquist, American Tables and Looking Glasses, 31.

128 Bushman, The Refinement o f America, 281; for further discussion of the changes between women and domesticity in this era see Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England,” 129.

129 Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,” 523-4.

130 Carson, “The Consumer Revolution,” 569-607, 618.

136

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 131 McKendrick et. al., The Birth o f a Consumer Society, 118-119.

132 Martin, “Magical, Mythical, Practical, and Sublime,” 38-39.

133 Carr and Walsh, “The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” 141; Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England,” 128; Sweeney, “Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield,” 288.

134 McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America, 102; McCusker, Money and Exchange, 133; Main, “The Standard of Living in Southern New England,” 127. ’

137

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. REFERENCES

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