Newport and the Townsend inheritance

In the June 1937 issue of this magazine the editor, Homer Eaton Keyes (1875-1938), published an article about a group of pieces of Newport furniture with a history of descent from John Townsend. (1) Keyes hypothesized that they could be the work of Townsend himself, a speculation that has since been confirmed by comparing them with signed examples that have subsequently turned up. A number of these family pieces, now owned by the Newport Restoration Foundation, are in the monographic exhibition of Townsend's work on view this summer in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, (2) making this an appropriate occasion to review more broadly a whole range of objects said to have links to the Townsend family.

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A careful reading of John Townsend's will, (3) written in 1805, four years before his death, informs us that he made what he judged to be some of his best furniture for members of his immediate family and that he considered these pieces his special legacy to specific individuals. In his own words:

To daughter Mary Townsend [1769-1856]:

One of my best Bedsteads with Claw feet, with the Bed thereon, usually kept in the great Chamber, and the Bedstead and Bed in my Keeping room Chamber, which belonged to my daughter Sarah [1773-1803].... Also my best Mahogany Bureau, which I made for her Mother and one plain Mahogany Bureau, eight Mahogany Chairs with Claw feet, six Black walnut Chairs with Hair bottoms, my Easy Chair, two Mahogany Oval Pembroke Tables. One Square Mahogany four feet Table with fluted legs, one Mahogany three feet square Table with fluted legs, one square Mahogany Pembroke Table with Stretchers, one mahogany Tea Table with the set of China it Contains, three dozen China Plates and three large China Platters ... six large Silver Spoons, my silver Pepper Box & Cream Pot, one Silver Porringer marked P.C. ...

To son Solomon Townsend [c. 1775-1821]:

A Mahogany Desk I had made for him and a Clock made by Walter Cornell [b. 1777; w. in Newport and Providence 1797-1853] with the Case & c

To son John F. Townsend:

My Clock which now stands in my Keeping Room made by [Paul] Storr [1771-1844] in London.

To son Charles F. Townsend:

My Mahogany Desk which I have now in use and the Mahogany Bureau which was his Sister Sarah's.

Of all the pieces enumerated in the will, "one of my best Bedsteads with Claw feet" and two of the "eight Mahogany Chairs with Claw feet" (see Pl. II), both left to Mary, can most easily be identified among the pieces that ended up at the Newport Restoration Foundation. Indeed, the chairs, thanks to Keyes's observations, were long the Rosetta stone for identifying Townsend's work in seating furniture. It turns out that their telltale claw-and-ball feet closely resemble those on a card table signed by John Townsend in 1762. (4) One of the "two Mahogany Oval Pembroke Tables," also left to Mary, and one of the two mahogany desks left to his sons Solomon and Charles can also probably be identified with pieces now owned by the foundation. The desk (Pl. V), made of the most magnificent mahogany and unquestionably the work of John Townsend's own hand, is two inches wider than the standard model (a mass-produced type the Townsend shop made for venture cargo), and originally had three deep drawers rather than the present four shallow ones. In other words, it was originally made on the model of the bottom half of a great Newport desk-and-bookcase, but without the blocking or shells. This remodeling appears to have been done in the eighteenth century, probably by Townsend himself, which may be an indication that it was his own desk--the one he left to his son Charles.

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Let us now trace how that furniture descended. Mary, the principal recipient of John's household goods, later married but had no children. At her death in 1856 she left "all the household furniture" and virtually everything else she owned to her nephew Christopher Townsend (1807-1881), the son of her brother John F. Townsend. When Christopher died he in turn left everything, again including "all household furniture," to his sister Ellen Townsend. Ellen was also the recipient of other material inheritances, principally from her mother, Ann Easton Townsend, a descendant of one of the founders of Newport, but doubtless from her father as well. It was Ellen, who never married and had a compelling interest in Newport history, who made the initial distribution of various of these possessions to local cultural institutions: the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in 1883 and the Newport Historical Society in 1884. It is worth examining these benefactions carefully in order to determine from whence individual things came.

It must have been between Ellen's receipt of Christopher's bequest in 1881 and her gift of three pieces of furniture to the Newport Historical Society in 1884 that Mary Buffum, an amateur artist, drew the watercolor picture of the family furniture as arranged in Ellen's parlor at 57 Broadway, Newport (Pl. I). The earliest surviving image of any of the family possessions, it shows a mixture of mid- and late eighteenth-century pieces. The oldest in style is the typical Newport tea table with pointed pad feet of about 1745, doubtless identifiable with the one Ellen gave to the Newport Historical Society in 1884. (5) The side chair to its left may be one of the eight by John Townsend of which two are now at the Newport Restoration Foundation (see Pl. II). The camelback sofa, while associated with Philadelphia, is a form that was also made in Newport. Flanking it are straight-leg pieces: at the left a characteristic John Townsend stop-fluted pembroke table with crossed stretchers, and at the right an unusual open-arm upholstered-back armchair. (6) Of the other furniture, all in the Federal style, the breakfront bookcase, a form nearly exclusive to Salem, Massachusetts, is presumably identifiable with one from the Easton family that Ellen Townsend gave the Redwood Library in 1883 (Fig. 1). (7) The armchair with the urn centered in its pierced splat is similar to a chair design in a 1788 newspaper advertisement of Thomas Timpson (w.c. 1785-1806) of New York City, indicative of the strong influence New York had on Newport furniture in the Federal style. (8)