This medium-size table with single drawer represents the sort of utilitarian form that could be placed against a wall or pulled out into a room as usage re­quired. The design, with the single lower stretcher and high front and back stretch­ers, appears in the seventeenth century. However, the use of maple rather than oak and the crisp vase and paired-vase turnings, which relate to the stretcher de­sign of early easy chairs of about 1715–30, indicate a later origin.

Technical notes: Eastern white pine (top, right drawer runner), soft maple (left front leg). The drawer construction is dovetailed, the flat bottom let into the sides and back.

Related examples: Sack 1950, p. 236; Nutting 1962, no. 854.

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.