By about 1820, the placement of a round table in the center of the room became standard for the furnishing plan of the fashionable American parlor. Thomas Webster in his Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy describes the form and relates that such tables “are made with the pillar extremely strong.” This example, with its plain, uncarved, tapering circular pillar and simple cone-shaped feet, is in the late classical taste of the Restoration style. The top is painted with an idyllic lakeside scene in the Romantic taste, and paint is skillfully used to emulate rosewood and brass ornament on the pillar and platform base. The landscape, which is surrounded by a border of gilt cornucopia and scrolls, relates to landscapes on a group of New York chairs (see B.67.27.1–.4) and also to a small body of center tables that feature painted scenes on their tops. The gilt freehand grapevine decoration around the base recalls the ornament on a group of furniture made in New York by the partnership of Brazilia Deming and Erastus Bulkley and retailed in Charleston, South Carolina

Technical notes: Mahogany (top, feet); eastern white pine (rim, top two braces under top, base, board underneath column), cherry (lowest brace under top), paint, gilt.

Related examples: This table, with its wood top, seems to be a less expensive version of center tables with slate tops painted with enamels, often referred to as Italian tops, and ornamented with Romantic scenes; two Baltimore examples with borders of oak leaves are shown in Elder 1972, no. 29 with a similar water scene, and no. 30 with a classical ruin scene. Elder suggests, p. 52, that these scenes may be derived from the work of either Claude Vernet or Carle Vernet, French landscape painters. A New York example with a naval engagement is at Winterthur (Sweeney 1963, p. 128).

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.