The painted furniture of Maine

Magazine Antiques, May, 2000 by Edwin A. Churchill, Thomas B. Johnson

A remarkable example of one decorator's versatility is found in a well-known chest of drawers in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, [22] and a blanket chest (Pl. XII) and matching box that surfaced just a few years ago (Pl. XIII). The chest of drawers, which was intended to mimic a more formal piece, with painted graining and bands of painted "inlay," is inscribed "Made by E. Morse/Livermore June 7th 1814." The seemingly unrelated blanket chest is inscribed "New Portland" across the top. It is a piece to surprise and delight, with a dramatically shaped skirt and exotic decoration that have little to do with copying more proper forms. Further research uncovered the fact that an Elias Morse was listed in the 1820 Federal census as a resident of Livermore and in the 1830 census as a resident of New Portland. [23] A subsequent reexamination of the blanket chest exposed the name "Morse" written in pencil inside the top drawer. Judging by the extreme differences between the chest and the blanket chest an d its matching box, Elias Morse had two clients with very different tastes in decoration, and he was accomplished enough to accommodate them both.

EDWIN A. CHURCHILL is the chief curator of the Maine State Museum in Augusta.

THOMAS B. JOHNSON is the curator of the Old York Historical Society in York, Maine.

(1.) (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1972), p. 5.

(2.) Edwin A. Churchill, Simple Forms and Vivid Colors: An Exhibition of Maine Painted Furniture, 1800-1850, at the Maine State Museum (Maine State Museum, Augusta, 1983), particularly pp. 19-23. This book has been recently reprinted by the Maine State Museum.

(3.) Much of the information in this article is derived from research for the traveling exhibition entitled Out of the Woods: Two Hundred Years of Maine Furniture, first installed at the Maine State Museum in Augusta in October 1997.

(4.) Lincoln County Registry of Probate, 2:248 (Wiscasset, Maine).

(5.) Illustrated and discussed in Nina Fletcher Little, Little by Little: Six Decades of Collecting American Decorative Arts (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1984), pp. 199-201.

(6.) Sewall's work is detailed in Myrna Kaye, "The furniture of Samuel Sewall," ANTIQUES, August 1985, pp. 276-284; and Brock Jobe and Myrna Kay, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1984), pp. 158-161, 201-204, 275-278, and 289-291. The chest in Pl, II exhibits less accomplished dovetailing and has rabbeted drawer bottoms held in place by wrought nails driven into the bottom of the rear board of the drawer frame; pieces attributed to Sewall consistently have wooden pegs for fasteners.

(7.) In the Maine State Museum; illustrated in "A Signed Painted Washstand" in the museum's Broadside, vol. 6, no.3 (Spring 1984), p.4. Not covered in this article is the furniture produced by the Acadian settlers in the Saint John River valley of extreme northern Maine. Although plain, it was often enlivened with bright blue, pink, red, and white painted decoration. See Edwin A. Churchill and Sheila McDonald, "Reflections of Their World: The Furniture of the Upper St. John Valley, 1820-1930," in Perspectives on American Furniture, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward (W. W. Norton, New York, for the Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware, 1988), pp. 63-91.