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Photo: Courtesy Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, Del., 1958.0135.003
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Card table

Object number

RIF698

Maker

Maker John Townsend, American, 1732/33–1809

Dimensions

Closed: 28 1/4 × 36 × 17 3/4 in. (71.76 × 91.44 × 45.09 cm)

Date

1796

Current location

Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library

Geography

Made in Newport, Rhode Island
(view a map of Rhode Island)

Medium

Mahogany (primary); white pine (front rail); soft maple (rear rail); light and dark wood inlay

Marks

"Made By / Jo... Townsend, Newport, " printed and "1796," in ink, on paper label glued to rear rail between hinged rails

Inscriptions

Unknown

Provenance

By descent in the King family, Newport, Rhode Island; by descent to Mrs. Alexander Nelidow (née Dorothy Gordon King). C. W. Lyon, Inc., New York; sold to Colonel Guy W. Walker, Jr. (1897–1978); sold to Henry F. du Pont (1880–1969), Winterthur, Delaware; given to the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, Delaware, 1958

Associated names

Dorothy Gordon King
Colonel Guy Warren Walker, Jr.
King family
C. W. Lyon, Inc.

Notes

The matching table of the pair, RIF1361, is owned by the Preservation Society of Newport County. It was given to the Preservation Society in 1972 as part of the contents of Kinscote, a mid-nineteenth-century family house in Newport.

Related objects

See also

Bibliography

Michael Moses and Liza Moses, "Authenticating John Townsend's Later Tables," Antiques 119, no. 5 (May 1981): 1157, fig. 8–8a.
Ralph E. Carpenter, Jr., The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1820 (Newport, R.I.: Preservation Society of Newport County, 1954), 96, no. 68, ill.
Michael Moses, Master Craftsmen of Newport: The Townsends and Goddards (Tenafly, N.J.: MMI Americana Press, 1984), 110, 112, fig. 3.22–3.22a, 3.26.
"The Editor's Attic," Antiques 60, no. 4 (October 1951): 320, ill.
Charles F. Montgomery, American Furniture: The Federal Period, 1788–1825 (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 34, 324, no. 288, fig. 95.
Ralph E. Carpenter, Jr., "The Newport Exhibition," Antiques 64, no. 1 (July 1953): 41, fig. 14.
Morrison H. Heckscher, John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 60, 168–70, 194–95, no. 42, fig. 67.
Christie's, New York, Important American Furniture, Folk Art, and Decorative Arts, sale cat. (October 5, 2000), 112, ill.
Patricia E. Kane et al., Art and Industry in Early America: Rhode Island Furniture, 1650–1830, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2016), 409nn1–2.
Helena Hayward, ed., World Furniture: An Illustrated History (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965), 196, fig. 730.