The chest-on-chest was produced throughout eighteenth-century America. In some places, such as New York and Charleston, where the high chest of drawers was no longer fashionable, the chest-on-chest or clothespress became the requisite bedroom form. In Philadelphia the price lists specify that the chest-on-chest cost exactly the same amount as a high chest, the two being the most expensive forms recorded.

The scale of the Bayou Bend chest-on-chest is less overpowering than most, producing a piece of furniture on a more human scale. Like the Philadelphia high chest, it asserts an architectural presence. Its drawer configuration is unusual: the three small horizontal drawers traditionally across the top tier have been omitted, allowing for an additional full-length drawer below, resulting in more usable storage and a successful, linear arrangement of the hardware. The asymmetrical drawer pulls challenge the horizontality of the stacked drawers and divert attention toward the cornice, scrolled pediment, and central ornament.

Technical notes: Mahogany; mahogany (cornice’s interior front and sides, side brace of lower case’s center drawer), Atlantic white cedar (dustboards, horizontal divider between the two upper drawers, corner glue blocks, backboards, upper chest top, cornice glue blocks), yellow-poplar (foot blocks, board behind middle drawer in upper case), white oak (carved basket’s pin), southern yellow pine (the remaining secondary woods). The foot blocks are quarter round. The bottom drawer is flush with the case bottom. Braces aligned with the top of each drawer are attached to the side with vertical glue blocks in each front corner. The drawers are separated by full dustboards. A guide separates the two uppermost drawers. The third component is the removable cornice and pediment. Charleston cabinetmaker Richard McGrath’s 1772 advertisement implies its flexibility as a separate unit: “Double chests of Drawers, with neat and light Pediment Heads, which take off and put on occasionally.” The top of the upper case is dovetailed to the sides, with beveled comers and an interior frame secured by blocks. The chest retains its original hardware, which, with the addition of tinted shellac, produces the appearance of gilding. A number of illegible chalk inscriptions may be contemporary with the chest’s manufacture.

Related examples: A similar pediment appears on a desk and bookcase illustrated in Hummel 1976, p. 94.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.