Reappraising an upside-down Shaker masterpiece

Magazine Antiques, March, 2004 by John T. Kirk

The yellow Shaker case with two cupboards and four drawers shown in Plate I became well known when it was included in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1986 and illustrated in the accompanying catalogue. Eleven years later I wrote about it:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What the design achieves, perhaps without conscious intention, is an
extraordinary rhythm and movement: the vertical of the lower door moves
up to a tight, complex drawer area. Then the knobs spread the eye out to
move up and around the cupboard door above.... This piece is one of the
great manifeslations of a maker's ability to pull a freewheeling design
into a tight sense of order. To what degree the visual delight was
planned, or perceived and disscused after being made, we do not know:
That it does delight is certain. (2)

In October 2003 the case was sold at a Boston auction, (3) and during the preview of the sale I was surprised to learn that it may have been turned upside down years ago. (4) The evidence for this involves the present position of the locks in the two drawers. Originally the locks held fast when their keepers, or tongue extensions, protruded into slots cut in the rail above them. However, at present the slots for the locks are in the rail below all the drawers. To make the locks function properly the piece should be inverted, as in Plate II, and all the drawers turned over. Finally, the small drawer with a lock needs to be exchanged with the similar drawer below it.

It has been long accepted that the piece was originally built into a room as a permanent fixture and that when it became a freestanding object new moldings were added to the top and bottom edges. (5) I noted that when installed in its room at Enfield, Connecticut, a short piece of furniture was attached to one side. (6) I wrote further:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There appears to be a red coat under the yellow.... Probably the
interior areas once had later paint: the left edge of the top door has
some thick yellow-white paint; its inside surface has been cleaned, and
some red color remains under a later clear finish. The present owner
[Gustave Nelson] took off "the original iron latches" and put on the
wooden catches. (They have left rectangular marks on the doors.) (7)

After leaving the preview of the Boston auction I wondered in what ways I had been wrong when praising an upside-down object. I returned the next day to spend time with the piece and found things I should have noted earlier. The keyhole to the lower cupboard door is at present upside down, for the round part is at the bottom when it should be at the top. The bottom board of the upper cupboard is only a loose piece of quarter-inch-thick yellowish plywood. There are stains and signs of wear on the bottoms of all the shelves in the two cupboards and on the bottom of the present top board. The original yellow paint covers the lower forty-nine inches of the left side. There is new yellow paint on the upper part of the left side and on the entire right side. Two broad grooves extend across the entire back.

All the anomalies are resolved when the piece is turned over and the drawers repositioned, as shown in the computer-corrected image in Plate II. The keepers of the drawer locks fit into the slots in the rail above them. (The circular part of all three keyholes is at the top.) The bottom board of the small cupboard is now the bottom board of the case, and the piece of plywood is no longer necessary. The bottom of the large cabinet is a solid board that extends from side to side and front to back. Its front edge is the rail above the drawers, and slots for the lock keepers are cut up into it. The original yellow paint on the side is now at the top, leaving space below for the smaller piece of furniture once attached. The top molding of that shorter piece overlapped the front edge of the large case. Its profile has left an unpainted area to the right of the top drawer (see Pl. III). (8) The upper groove across the back is 1/4 of an inch deep and 3 7/8 inches high. Its upper edge is 16 1/8 inches from the top of the piece. It was probably intended to fit around a peg rail set mostly into the plaster wall. Shaker domestic and work areas were replete with such rails holding numerous pegs for hanging a wide variety of items (see Pl. IV). The lower groove is 5 1/2 inches high. Its upper third is 5/8 of an inch deep while the lower two thirds is cut in only 1/4 of an inch. The bottom edge of the groove is 22 1/2 inches from the floor. The cut probably allowed the piece to fit around a chair rail with a projecting upper molding. (9)

When a large piece was built into Shaker rooms as part of the original construction, the peg and chair rails stopped on either side of the case. The grooves across the back of the piece under discussion indicate that it was installed after the room was completed. The fact that it contains both an upper and lower cupboard and drawers of unequal size suggests it was originally in a work area. Early Shaker furniture in nonwork areas typically had a more symmetrical appearance, with one or two flanking cupboard doors placed above a bank of drawers of equal length.