Household

A few nice household mould created in china photos I found:

IMG_6385

Image by Christine G. H. Franck
&quotChina table
1765-1775
Origin: America, Virginia, Williamsburg
OH: 30 1/8&quot OW: 36 3/eight&quot OD: 23 5/16&quot
All elements are of mahogany.
Purchased with funds offered by Mrs. William C. Schoettle

Acc. No. 1980-95

Look: rectangular best with astragal molded edge sawn interlacing guilloche fretwork gallery with astragal molded prime edge four fretwork aprons with sawn and drilled foliated pattern front and rear aprons feature fretwork pendants centering profile of a bird, that on rear side in blind profile, that on front with carved tail, feather, eye, and beak particulars four legs, L-shaped in cross section, with sawn and drilled fretwork of rosettes and interlacing scrolls each leg flanked by two sawn fretwork brackets incorporating C-scrolls.

Building: The legs are not mitered, as on most British examples, but sawn from solid single boards. The rails and gallery are solid nonlaminated elements as nicely. The gallery is mitered at the corners and glued into a rabbet at the outer edges of the single-board leading, which in turn is nailed to the frame by way of the rabbet. Vertical quarter-round mahogany blocks further support the gallery at its corners and an astragal molding is glued and nailed to the edges of the leading. The rails are tenoned into the legs, and the knee brackets are glued and nailed to the legs and aprons with out benefit of tenons.

Mark(s): None.

Inscription(s): None.

Label:
In explaining the use of china tables, Thomas Chippendale wrote in 1762 that they had been intended &quotfor holding each a Set of China, and may be employed as Tea-Tables.&quot With their fencelike fretwork galleries, china tables have been admirably suited for the protection of costly tea wares. A lot more crucial, they provided gentry householders an uncommonly sophisticated implies of displaying tea china even when it was not in use, thus supplying visitors with a visual reminder of the owner’s taste, status, and social position.

China tables have been fairly well-known in Britain but have been created infrequently in the colonies. Most of the known American examples have been manufactured in those urban centers exactly where British influence on neighborhood cabinetmaking was especially sturdy. One particular example is Portsmouth, New Hampshire, exactly where at least eight ornate china tables with elaborate crossed stretchers were made throughout the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Portsmouth artisans have been heavily influenced by the Boston cabinet trade till some shifted to a strikingly British furniture style in the 1760s and 1770s, a modify almost certainly triggered by the arrival of a few British cabinetmakers about that time.

China tables have been also made in Charleston, South Carolina, one more center exactly where British influence prevailed. Though no extant Charleston china tables have yet been identified, records of their production survive. In 1772, cabinetmaker Richard Magrath, who had not too long ago arrived from London, advertised his capability to make a wide assortment of fashionable furniture types including &quotChina Tables.&quot Thomas Elfe created the form as nicely, supplying tables with a variety of optional components. Elfe’s accounts among 1768 and 1775 list everything from straightforward &quotChina Tables&quot or a &quotchina tea table&quot to a &quotChina frett tea table&quot and &quotcommode [i.e., serpentine] fret China Tables with castors.&quot The Elfe accounts also acknowledge the inherent fragility of china tables given that the artisan recorded mending and even replacing their fretwork galleries routinely.

British-oriented cabinetmakers in Williamsburg made their share of china tables as well. Eight tables are identified, among them this effectively-preserved example that descended in the Lewis and Byrd families of nearby Gloucester County. As opposed to most American china tables, this 1 and a related Williamsburg example now owned by the State Department have legs composed of open fretwork. The foliated fret pattern mirrors that employed for the carved blind frets on the back of the Masonic Master’s chair produced for Lodge six in Williamsburg. This association, with each other with the table’s nearby history, accounts for the Williamsburg attribution. The identical fret pattern also seems in the richly carved aprons of a number of very diverse but no less exceptional Williamsburg china tables, which includes acc. 1991-431. The fret design was probably adapted from several patterns for fireplace fenders published in the 1764-1765 edition of HOUSEHOLD Furnishings IN THE PRESENT TASTE. Even the birds in the front and rear aprons of the present table can be traced to this source.

1 of the most puzzling elements of china table production in colonial Tidewater Virginia is the intrinsically ornate nature of the form, which is at odds with the neat and plain taste that permeates most other eastern Virginia cabinet wares of the identical date. There is no concrete explanation for the anomaly, although an intriguing connection may link Masonic chairs and china tables. Despite the fact that the chairs were utilized in the meeting halls of an exclusive fraternal society and the tables have been made for the parlors and drawing rooms of the wealthy elite, every single form was nonetheless a central element in elaborate ceremonies–ritualized secret meetings on the one particular hand and ritualized social gatherings on the other. Maybe their roles as symbolic focal points of crucial social ceremonies demanded high levels of ornamentation.

Provenance:
The table was known in the family of the last private owner as the &quotLewis Table&quot and the &quotSusan Lewis Table.&quot According to household tradition, it descended from Susan Lewis (b. 1782) and her husband, William Powell Byrd (b. 1776), of Whitehall, Gloucester Co., Va., by means of the family to Richard Corbin Byrd (b. 1837), to his daughter, Fanny Marshall Byrd (1869-1960), who bequeathed the table to her daughter, Katherine Corbin Waller (1899-1994), from whom the table was acquired by CWF in 1980.&quot

From: emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp?action=newpage&amps…