About 1700, the pianoforte, a new musical instrument operated with hammers sounding the strings, evolved in Florence, Italy. In the mid-eighteenth century the English adapted the Italian invention to the clavichord case, creating the square piano. By 1800 that form was being produced by American craftsmen, including the immigrant British piano makers Gibson and Davis, who founded their New York partnership in 1801. Their pride in English training is conveyed by the inscription on the painted name board, where they also indicate that this model is a horizontal grand. The trestle or cheval bases, produced for the piano makers by cabinetmaking shops, derive from the sofa table form, for which the 1810 New York price book describes “two turned…pillars straight stretcher and four claws.”

Technical notes: Mahogany, mahogany veneer, satinwood (inlaid panels with cut corners), soft maple (strip below keyboard), holly (name board and sides, open fretwork, veneer at end of keys); yellow-poplar (black piano keys, D-shaped ends for hammers’ support, core of music rack base, panels behind fretwork, board on which hammers rest), holly (veneer layer below string board, interior fretwork on right side of case, veneer on interior sides of case, tuning pin board, string pin board, interior lining board left of keyboard), beech (tuning string supports), basswood (key bars), cherry (rocker pin board for supporting key bars), soft maple (molding surrounding horizontal triangular fretwork in right side of case), eastern white pine (soundboard in right side of case, name board on which holly is veneered, bottom board of piano case, painted cover board), hemlock (cleat under painted board), mahogany (hammer shafts, hammer mechanism parts, hammer board to which they are hinged, trim around the soundboard, music rack, lid support, interior carved fretwork to right of keyboard), ash (support frame for piano case). This piano appears to have had the earlier simple wire pedals and later, perhaps in the 1820s or 1830s, was adapted with the current lyre pedal arrangement. Nameboard is inscribed: “Gibson & Davis / New York from London” and “Patent Grand.”

Related examples: Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan (Otto 1965, no. 44); a virtually identical example, but without the lyre pedal, at MMA (Libin 1985, pp. 168–69); advertisement of Carl and Celia Jacobs, Antiques 90 (October 1966), p. 446; advertisement of Ginsburg and Levy, Antiques 107 (March 1975), p. 381; advertisement of Israel Sack, Antiques 138 (September 1990), p. C-2; Sack 1969–92, vol. 10, p. 2620, no. P6228.

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.