The Dutch custom of storing spoons in carved wall racks placed in the kitchen was apparently transmitted to the New Netherlands, and approximately sixty American examples survive today. Tradi­tionally, a bride received the spoon rack from her new husband, and it remained her personal possession. While the extant American examples vary in individual or­nament, they all share the basic vertical format and have three shelves fitted with slots for spoons. Commonly made of poplar and decorated with shallow, typi­cally northern European chip carving, the racks were usually painted; this exam­ple shows traces of a dark orange-red pigment.

Technical notes: A small ornamental disk at the top right is missing. Traces of red paint in the recesses of the chip carving appear to be original and seem consistent with what has been found on related objects of the period; the red is an iron oxide, unevenly ground (in­dicating hand grinding of the pigments), in an oil and resin binder.

Related examples: Chipstone (Rodriguez Roque 1984, no. 187); Milwaukee Art Museum (Jobe et al. 1991, p. 89, no. 32); Bergen County Historical Society, River Edge, New Jersey (Blackburn et al. 1988, pp. 159–61), and New Jersey 1958, no. 54.

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.