Danish West Indian furniture

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1999 by Michael Connors

8 Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, Chapel Hill, 1972), p. 294.

9 Besides the McFarlanes, other known cabinetmakers on Saint Croix at this time were Maxwell Plaskett, a Mr. Grant, and Septimus MacBean, according to Alberic G. Lightbourn in various annual editions of Lightbourn's Annual and Commercial Directory of the Virgin Island's, published by A. G. Lightbourn in Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and also my interviews with a McFarlane descendant.

10 The freedmen or free-colored were "the Negroes who either have purchased their freedom, or have obtained the same through the owner's liberality" (Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, ed. B. W. Higman [University of the West Indies Press, Mona, Jamaica, and Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1992], p. 153).

MICHAEL CONNORS is an adjunct professor of arts at New York University and also teaches courses in furniture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He is writing a book on colonial West Indian furniture.