image of object
Photo: Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 10.125.133
Click the image to enlarge

Dining table

Object number

RIF4143

Maker

Maker Unknown

Dimensions

Closed: 28 × 20 3/4 × 48 1/2 in. (71.12 × 52.71 × 123.19 cm) Width, open: 57 3/4 in. (146.69 cm) Width, frame: 17 3/4 in. (45.085 cm) Depth, frame: 35 3/4 in. (90.805 cm)

Date

1715–40

Current location

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Geography

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

Medium

Soft maple (primary); eastern white pine (side rails, drawers runners)

Marks

None

Inscriptions

None

Style

William and Mary

Provenance

H. Eugene Bolles (1838–1910), Boston; sold to Mrs. Russell Sage, New York, 1909; given to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1910

Associated names

H. Eugene Bolles

Construction

The frame has broader-than-usual proportions, with the ends half the length of the sides. The turned members and the side frame rails are made from two-inch stock. The mortise-and-tenon joints of the back and side frame rails are secured with two pins, all others with one. The center top consists of a single board and is affixed to each side rail with two long wooden pins that pass through the rail. The leaves, each formed of a wide inner board and a narrow board at the tip, abut the center with tongue-and-groove joints. They are attached with a surface-mounted iron butt hinge at each end, installed outside the leg and secured with rosehead nails with leather washers. (There are no recesses in the top of the side rails to accommodate hinges on the inner side of the legs). Both gates swing out from the same end of the frame, opposite the drawer. The pivot leg of the gate is round-tenoned to the rail and stretcher, and the foot below it is attached to the stretcher with a pinned rectangular tenon. There is a rail above as well as below the drawer, which rides on runners attached to the side rails by T-headed nails. Evidence of mill-sawing remains on the underside of the top and the inside of the back rail. Source: Frances Gruber Safford, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 156.

See also

Bibliography

Marvin D. Schwartz, American Furniture of the Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), no. 28, ill.
Marshall B. Davidson and Elizabeth Stillinger, The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), fig. 33–34.
A Walk through the American Wing, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 24–25, fig. 18.
Erik Gronning and Dennis Andrew Carr, "Early Rhode Island Turning," American Furniture (2005): 9, fig. 17–18.
Frances Gruber Safford, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1. Early Colonial Period, The Seventeenth-Century and William and Mary Styles (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 154–156, no. 63, ill.