Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, May, 1999 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

An enormous sailing yacht named Cleopatra's Barge was built in Salem, Massachusetts, for George Crowninshield (1766-1817) in 1816 at a cost of $50,000. It was furnished in such an opulent style that Cleopatra herself would have felt right at home. An example is the lyre-backed settee from the ship shown on page 750, Plate VII, and on the cover of this issue. The design of the lyres on the settee appears to be identical to that of the lyre on the card table shown here, and both pieces have bird'seye maple panels and brass paw feet with casters. Not only did the settee and the card table probably come from the same Salem or Boston cabinetmaker, but it seems equally probable that the card table was on the yacht along with the settee.

The ship had a brief and varied life. Crowninshield sailed it to the Mediterranean from March to October 1817 and died on board in November while in Salem harbor. The contents were then sold at auction and the vessel was converted to the merchant trade. In 1920 the ship was sold to the Hawaiian royal family, and four years later, manned by a drunken crew, it sank off the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

The card table, then apparently one of a pair, was bought by Samuel Grandin Johnston De Camp, an army surgeon, in 1827 at Fort Brook in Tampa Bay, Florida. According to his account the owners after Crowninshield included two generals (Andrew Jackson among them), a colonel, and a lieutenant. Their good taste is self-evident because the table includes the finest materials then available to realize a richly complex design. The table joins other furnishings from the yacht at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, where it will be installed in the museum's reconstruction of the saloon on Cleopatra's Barge that was created in 1953.

The diamond-head timepiece appears to have been devised to circumvent the patent issued to Simon Willard (1753-1848) in 1802 for his enormously popular banjo clock. Fewer than a dozen are known, and of those at least three, including the one illustrated here, were made by Willard's former apprentice and journeyman Daniel Munroe, who set up shop in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1797 and subsequently worked there and in Boston, sometimes in partnership with his brother Nathaniel (1777-1861). The design of these clocks differs from Willard's patent timepiece not only in the shape of the head but also in having an inverted movement (that is, the suspension point for the pendulum is at the bottom rather than the top of the movement) and a falloff strike. In addition, Munroe's diamond-head clocks are distinguished by diminutive cast-brass bracket feet.

Ima Hogg would be most delighted by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's acquisition of the great chair shown on page 666 for her erstwhile home, Bayou Bend. She always sought early southern furniture, but examples were often difficult to find. Dating between about 1680 and 1700, this armchair is the earliest known piece that can be ascribed to Charleston, South Carolina. It is believed to have been made by a French emigre craftsman and expresses the cross-cultural traditions represented in Charleston at this time. The turned spindle back is related to English and New England furniture, while the treatment of the arms ties it to French and southern turned chairs. The space between the stay rail and the seat, most likely created to accommodate the ties of a cushion, is a feature of French chairs.

The desk-and-bookcase shown here is one of three very similar ones made by the Glasgow-born cabinetmaker John Shaw, who was working in Annapolis, Maryland, by 1768. By 1772, and until 1776, he was in partnership with Archibald Chisholm (w.c. 1770-d. 1810), another Scot. From 1777 until 1819 he was the Armorer for the State of Maryland, which earlier had commissioned much of the furniture he made for its official buildings. Transitional in style, the desk-and-bookcase is an essentially rococo form with neoclassical ornament that lends it a sense of lightness and grace.