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Photo: Courtesy Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, Del., 1955.0793
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High-post bed

Object number

RIF1206

Maker

Maker Unknown

Dimensions

Height: 91 1/2 in. (232.411 cm) Height, posts: 90 3/4 in. (230.506 cm) Height, rails: 17 1/4 in. (43.815 cm) Length, posts: 77 1/2 in. (196.85 cm) Length, feet: 79 in. (200.66 cm) Width, posts: 57 1/2 in. (146.05 cm) Width, feet: 60 in. (152.4 cm)

Date

1740–70

Current location

Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library

Geography

Made in Eastern Massachusetts, or made in Rhode Island
(view a map of Rhode Island)

Medium

Mahogany (primary); soft maple (side rails and headboard), white pine (tester rails- not original)

Inscriptions

"I" –"VIII" incised on rails and adjacent posts, at their juncture, clockwise, from left headpost:

Style

Queen Anne

Provenance

Collings and Collings, New York; sold to Henry Francis du Pont (1880–1969), Winterthur, Delaware, 1927; given to Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, Delaware, 1955

Associated names

Collings and Collings
Henry Francis du Pont

Construction

The headboard is tenoned into two slots in the headposts but is not pinned. All four posts are identical and are plain, tapered columnar pillars above the rail, ending in cabriole legs with pad feet raised on shallow disks. The rectangular rails, higher than they are wide, are molded on the upper outside edge and cut with a deep rabbet on the inner edge to hold the turned pegs for a roped or sacking bottom. The rails are tenoned to the posts and held with bed bolts; the housed nuts for the bolts are mortised into the rails and plugged on the outside. The rectangular tester (not original) has mitered corners and rests on iron pins in the tops of the posts. Source: Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur, (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Publications, 1997), 200.

Bibliography

Loan Exhibition of Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Furniture and Glass, exh. cat. (New York: American Art Galleries, 1929), n.p., no. 562, ill.
Joseph Downs, American Furniture: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods in the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum (New York: MacMillan Company, 1952), n.p., no. 1, ill.
Helen Comstock, American Furniture: Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Century Styles (New York: Viking Press, 1962), fig. 138.
Marshall B. Davidson, The American Heritage History of Colonial Antiques (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1967), fig. 214.
Joseph T. Butler, American Furniture from the First Colonies to World War I (London: Triune Books, 1973), 30–31.
Oscar P. Fitzgerald, Three Centuries of American Furniture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1982), fig. III-7.
Jay E. Cantor, Winterthur (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985), 105.
Nancy E. Richards and Nancy Goyne Evans, New England Furniture at Winterthur: Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur Publications, 1997), 199–200, no. 103, ill.