This chest with upper storage area, ac­cessed via a lift top, and two lower draw­ers represents a relatively common form of case furniture in late-seventeenth-century New England. These chests, pro­duced by joiners using mortise-and-tenon construction, reflect the traditional tech­niques of joinery of Elizabethan and Ja­cobean England transferred to the New World. Typically, the drawers are sus­pended on side runners, as seen in the present example. The carved ornament of the facade makes this chest, and the group to which it belongs, distinctive. The vine, tulip, and leaf motif appears with variations on a relatively large num­ber of surviving chests produced in the Connecticut River valley around Hatfield and Hadley, Massachusetts, and possibly as far south as Hartford, Connecticut. Features of the Bayou Bend chest that point to its origins in the Hatfield area are the undulating vines on the stiles and the lozenges with initials, rosettes, and tulips on the panels.

Technical notes: White oak (right front leg, right bottom rail); southern yellow pine (lift top, bottom, backboard of bottom drawer), red oak (right side of upper drawer). Lift top and pulls are replaced. Backboard is a beveled panel let into the frame of the chest section; a different board with chamfered edges is nailed to the back of the drawer section. The drawer is side-hung. The beveled drawer bot­tom is let into the front and nailed to the sides and back, with grain running side to side. The drawer sides are half-lapped front and back. There is an inscription: Mary Allyns Chistt Cutte and joined by Nich: Disbrowe (now considered spurious; see Hoopes 1933, p. 171).

Related examples: Kane 1975, pp. 110–11, discusses eleven closely related examples.

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.