The joined cupboard was among the most expensive furniture forms found in the seventeenth-century colonial American house, exceeded only by joined presses, elaborate chests of drawers, and uphol­stered pieces. These cupboards appear to have been placed in a room used for din­ing that also usually served as the parlor. While most seventeenth-century case furniture was rather utilitarian, this par­ticular form, with its partially open upper section, provided the opportunity to show off expensive silver, glass, or ceramics, and its possession clearly indicated that the owner was both affluent and an im­portant member of the community.

The upper section of this cupboard is architectonic, as is typical of the form. The frieze, which features a dentil course and moldings, is supported by vase forms that evoke the reverse tapering shape of columns in Mannerist architecture. Simi­larly, the applied spindles of the upper case take the form of Tuscan columns, which, in the unsettling anticlassical mode of Mannerism, have no architectural sup­port. The three corbels of the frieze are repeated in dentil form along the top frame of the lower case.

Although this cupboard has previously been associated with the Harvard College joiner tradition of Middlesex County, differences of construction technique and ornament suggest that it is more closely related to the Boston school. The dis­tinctive decorative motifs of this cup­board—bold corbels and dentils in the upper frieze and mitered cruciform panels on the doors—represent elements origi­nating in England in the mid-seventeenth century. Scholars believe that London-trained craftsmen in the Mason-Messinger shops introduced these innovations to Boston. Incorporation of these decora­tive motifs on the Bayou Bend cupboard suggest that its maker was emulating their new and fashionable designs. Yet not totally at home with them, he has used the turned vase-shaped columns and recessed upper cupboard arrangement that represents an earlier, more conserva­tive taste. The turning of the vase-shaped pillars and applied spindles, which also re­late to the Boston style, further strength­ens a Boston or Boston-area attribution

Technical notes: Red oak, red maple (right column); white pine (drawer bottom), western red cedar (replacement moldings). Three cor­bels replicate originals over turned balusters; applied mitered moldings on the panels and dentils at the top of the lower section were re­stored following the ghost images left by the originals. The loss of about three inches at the bottom of the legs was also restored. Knobs, although old, are not original. The drawer is side-hung. The drawer construction is dove­tailed, the bottom board let into the sides and front, with grain running side to side. The drawer back is butt-jointed to the sides

Related examples: Winterthur (Trent 1975, fig. 4), a cupboard with open lower section and an Essex County cupboard with drawers that incorporate similar corbels and serrated toothlike dentils (Nutting 1965, no. 199); Art Institute of Chicago, a one-drawer chest that incorporates similar construction techniques of double inset end panels and has one section of mitered molding (Trent 1975, fig. 5). For an English example with a similar combination of new and old ideas, see Kirk 1982, p. 201, no. 587.

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.