Although previously published as a New England example, this table has several features that suggest another origin. The unusual H-shaped stretcher arrangement echoes that seen in Continental tables and perhaps reflects a Dutch or Huguenot influence. The sausage turnings of the medial stretcher, distinctly different from the more common bobbin-shape turnings of the chairs and tables of the turn of the eighteenth century, also appear on the stretchers and back spindles of a group of small turned side chairs (see B.97.6) that have Continental antecedents and seem to have been made in New York or northern New Jersey, an area of Dutch settlement. The thin neck and rings of the feet also re­call the treatment on some of these chairs.

Technical notes: White oak (top, skirt, drawer front), soft maple (legs, stretchers); southern yellow pine (drawer bottom, right drawer guide, lower drawer guides), white oak (drawer rear and sides, upper drawer guides). The thick drawer sides, dovetailed to the front, hang on side runners, a feature seen on an Early Baroque walnut-veneered New York chest-on-frame at Winterthur (acc. no. 58.559). The drawer construction is dovetailed, the bottom board nailed, with grain running side to side.

Related examples: Wadsworth (Nutting 1962, no. 886), thought also to be of mid-Atlantic origin; Nutting 1962, no. 852; Lock­wood 1957, no. 697; New York State Museum, Albany (Scherer 1984, no. 2); Bybee Collection, Dallas Museum of Art, a Delaware Valley table with related but somewhat more truncated vase turnings and a drawer also hung on side runners (Venable 1989, p. 4, no. 2).

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.