This table varies discreetly from the previous examples, with claw feet substituted for the plain ones and its top slightly greater in diameter. According to the Philadelphia price lists these additions increased the cost of the simpler table by approximately 21 percent. While the lists do not specify the tea table top’s dimensions, they define that a folding stand’s diameter was no more than twenty-two inches, implying that anything larger was a tea table. 

Related examples: Downs 1952, no. 280; Comstock 1962, no. 234; Elder and Stokes 1987, pp. 167–68, no. 127; Venable 1989, p. 48, no. 22; Conger 1991, p. 107, no. 27; and a labeled tea table by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Edward James (Sack 1969–92, vol. 1, p. 200, no. 507).

Book excerpt: Warren, David B., 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.