Newport, a center of colonial cabinetmaking

Magazine Antiques, April, 1995 by Ralph E. Carpenter

In 1952 the Preservation Society of Newport County asked Joseph the director of Downs (1985-1954), the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, to supervise the restoration of Hunter House. Burdened with his duties at Winterthur and in ill health, he asked me to take over the restoration. Fortunately, relatively few structural changes to the building were required. The greatest need was to determine the original paint colors and replicate them on top of the many subsequent coats of paint. Nick Durante of Yonkers, New York, a genius at marbleizing and graining, accomplished this goal during a four-month stay in Newport.

The society determined that Hunter House should be furnished entirely with Newport furniture, particularly the superb work of the Townsend-Goddard dynasty.(1) Twenty-one members of successive generations of these two intermarried families worked as cabinetmakers over a period of 120 years, selling their products not only in New England but also in the coastal trade and in the West Indies.

Hunter House today provides a perfect setting for a collection of Newport furniture and decorative arts acquired over the past forty years. In addition to much Townsend-Goddard furniture, other Newport cabinetmakers are represented by labeled pieces, among them Palmer and Coe,(2) Holmes Weaver (see Pl. X), and Robert Lawton Jr.(3) These are complemented by a fine collection of Chinese export porcelain (see p. 558, Pl. II), as well as eighteenth-century lighting fixtures and textiles, many donated by J. A. Lloyd Hyde, an antiquarian who played an active role in furnishing the house.

The first step toward forming the collection was a loan exhibition held at Hunter House in the summer of 1953. It included an important group of Townsend-Goddard furniture as well as Newport paintings and silver. As the loans were being returned to their owners, Lew E. Brooks of Marshall, Michigan, an early collector of Americana, offered to sell his marble-topped table (Pl. VIII) since he wanted to buy a Stradivarius violin. The exhibition had generated so much enthusiasm in Newport that it was agreed that the table should be acquired. I offered to contribute to the cost if Mr. and Mrs. George Henry Warren, Mr. and Mrs. Wilmarth S. Lewis, Mrs. Louis S. Brugiere, and Robert G. Goelet would do likewise, and thus the table became part of the collection at Hunter House. A similar table in a private collection is accompanied by its original bill of sale signed by John Goddard, creating a sound basis for attributing the Hunter House table to Goddard. The deep skirt, bold curves, and robust legs and feet exemplify a style that might be called Quaker baroque. It has always seemed to me that the distinctive style of the Townsend-Goddard cabinetmakers was inspired by the scrolls of the baroque without extraneous ornamentation, which would have been contrary to Quaker custom.

Because all the objects in the 1953 loan exhibition had been photographed, the Preservation Society was able to publish a catalogue, The Arts and Crafts of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1820, soon afterwards. When the late Edgar Bingham, a member of the Preservation Society and the head of the antiques department of Shreve, Crump and Low in Boston, sent a copy of the book to Helena Connal-Rowan, a friend in Scotland, I, as the author of the catalogue, was invited to visit her. Living in Gargunuck, a town north of Sterling, but raised in Bristol, Rhode Island, she owned some furniture similar to that pictured in the book. When I arrived at her house Meiklewood she opened the door to the drawing room, which was full of Townsend-Goddard furniture. Mrs. Connal-Rowan had married a Scot years before and had gone to live abroad, taking with her the furniture she had inherited from the Rogers and Case families of Newport. Now she wanted to see the furniture returned. She came to Newport the following summer to satisfy herself that Hunter House was a suitable home for her collection. As a result, six Queen Anne side chairs, two tea tables, a dressing table, and a desk-and-bookcase are now in the northeast bedroom as a memorial to the Rogers and Case families. It is in this room that Admiral Charles Louis d'Arsac, chevalier de Ternay (1722-1780), the leader of the French fleet, died. (He had brought five thousand French troops to Newport for the winter of 1780-1781 before they marched to Yorktown, Virginia.)

The Connal-Rowan desk-and-bookcase (Pl. XII) has many features that proclaim its superiority. Behind the bookcase doors are two well-carved shells above a row of cubbyholes that conform to the concave base of the shells. Underneath the ledger dividers is a row of drawers with bleached mahogany drawer fronts. The interior of the desk section is skillfully executed with its three shells and blocked banks of drawers. With its bonnet top, bold finial, and case of flame figured mahogany, this is a truly superb example of a straight-front Townsend-Goddard desk-and-bookcase. Also part of the Connal-Rowan collection is the tea table shown in Plate XI. Tables of this design, with molded top, cabriole legs, and slipper feet, are among the most easily recognized of all Townsend-Goddard furniture.