Winter 2016

2016 Antiques & Fine Art 159 serendipitous events led to an amazing discovery, almost in my own back yard. For many years, my wife and I had been intrigued with another Boston merchant by the name of David Hinckley. Shortly after the War of 1812, Hinckley built a large granite house, no longer standing, on Beacon Street, near the Appleton brothers’ houses. He died in 1825 and the inventory of his estate lists rooms lavishly furnished with silk draperies and matching upholstery, marble statues, center tables with mosaic tops, and elegant chandeliers. We never located any furnishings with a Hinckley provenance and often wondered where Hinckley’s portrait by Gilbert Stuart might be. Lawrence Park’s four-volume work on Stuart published in 1926 recorded that the portrait had descended to a family member whose last name was Bangs. Doing a little Internet research one day, I typed in the name “David Hinckley Bangs,” and was surprised to discover that an individual with that name lived in my same town, in fact, only two streets away from where my wife and I live. I wrote to Mr. Bangs and asked if he knew the whereabouts of David Hinckley’s portrait or any of his furnishings. The day before I sent the letter, I had gone to Boston and done some probate research to determine if indeed Mary Appleton had left her estate to her favorite niece. She had not. Instead she had designated a nephew, Edward Bangs, to serve as executor and had left him all her real estate and possessions. I knew from Park’s book that David Hinckley’s granddaughter had married a man named Edward Bangs and a lso mentioned this coincidence in my letter. Mr. Bangs replied that although he did not own the portrait, he did have miniatures of David Hinckley and his wife. Nothing else remained in the family as far as he knew. He also said that the Edward Bangs who married Hinckley’s granddaughter was his great-grandfather. He invited us to come and look at the miniatures, which we happily did. While we were there, he showed us two pieces of furniture he had inherited and he asked if we thought they might relate to David Hinckley. One was too late in date, but I was stunned when I got closer to the second piece, in the corner of the living room. Staring me in the face was what had to be the secretary in the daguerreotype of Samuel Appleton (Fig. 3). The visual clue? The ormolu mounts. The proof? Our host’s relation to Mary Appleton’s nephew and heir. (Further research revealed that Edward Bangs in fact first met his future wife, Hinckley’s granddaughter, while she was staying with Samuel and Mary Appleton.) The secretary, now a gift to Historic New England, was probably commissioned soon after Appleton’s marriage in 1819 to Mary Lekain Gore, a widow twenty-three years younger. Examination by Robert Mussey and Clark Pearce has determined it was made by the firm of Isaac Vose and Joshua Coates, who also made furniture for Samuel’s brother, Nathan, at about the same time. Its discovery suggests the provenance of another piece attributed to that firm should be reconsidered: the pier table with its handsome specimen marble top in the Kaufman collection in Fig. 5 : Detail of figure 3. Ormolu mount, possibly depicting Psyche. France. This same mount and secretary (fig 3.) are visible in a circa-1845 portrait of Samuel Appleton by George Peter Alexander Healy (1813–1894), in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. the National Gallery in Washington (Fig. 4). Because that table was found in the house of Nathan Appleton’s daughter, Mrs. Greely Curtis, it was assumed she had inherited it from her father. But could it have belonged to Samuel instead and then given to his niece by Mary Appleton at some point as well? The curved shape of the base and the paw feet of the pier table depicted in the Edouart silhouette and, most significantly, the identical winged nymph mounts on Samuel’s secretary (Fig. 5) add credence to this conjecture. Perhaps one day another bit of serendipity will provide the answer.  Richard C. Nylander is curator emeritus of Historic New England . 1. Freeman Hunt, Our American Merchants, Vol 1, page 435, published in 1864. 2. They were first discussed by Page Talbot in The Magazine Antiques (May 1975). More recent research by Robert Mussey and Clark Pearce will be published in the forthcoming Boston Furniture, 1700–1900.