Delaware Antiques Show 2025

1 Elizabeth Dahill, “A Piedmont Desk in the Winterthur Museum.” Winterthur Museum. August 28, 1973. 2 Wallace Gusler, “The Furniture of Winchester, Virginia.” American Furniture 1997 . Accessed April 5, 2025. https://chipstone.org/article.php/290/American-Furniture-1997/The-Furniture-of-Winchester,-Virginia du Pont’s purchase from antiquarian Joseph Kindig, Jr. in the 1950s, the desk was placed in Winterthur’s Pennsylvania German Bedroom. The desk’s exuberant red, green, and untreated lightwood inlay dances across dark walnut, creating an almost kaleidoscopiceffectwith thescallopedborder surrounding theprofile (fig. 2). This inlay may explain this initial attribution, given du Pont’s and other mid-century Americana collectors’ familiarity with, and fondness for, the bright, hand-painted decoration often adorning Pennsylvania German furniture, a detail that likely overshadowed any potential Tennessee attributions. Elizabeth Dahill, a field researcher for the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, challenged the Pennsylvania German attribution in 1973, proposing the desk instead originated in North Carolina’s Piedmont region. Dahill connected local designs to those observed on Pennsylvanian German furniture, such as quarter fan motifs, seen also on pieces like Winterthur’s 1834 fall-front desk from Pennsylvania’s Mahantongo Valley cabinetmaker Jacob Maser. 1 Widespread use of tulip poplar and walnut by backcountry cabinetmakers also complicates a definitive regional attribution. Southeast Pennsylvanian and northern Shenandoah Valley makers shared these common primary and secondary woods with their counterparts in Wytheville, Virginia, and northeast Tennessee. Decorative and structural elements similarly cross-pollinated as high-style and plain furniture became available locally in towns along the Great Wagon Road by the early nineteenth century. Styles popular in the late eighteenth century, such as the rococo imaginings of Thomas Chippendale, informed furniture design and experienced regional adaptation with increased separation from design sources. Kindig, Jr.’s location of the desk in Wytheville demonstrates this regional interchange. In his 1997 article, Wallace Gusler connected the desk to late eighteenth-century examples from the Winchester, Virginia-based cabinetmakers Christopher Frye and James Lee Martin, with comparable treatment of valanced pigeonholes and the mirrored placement of two secret compartments. 2 Carved scalloped decoration on a circa 1790–1800 secretary and bookcase attributed to Moses Crawford, Tennessee’s earliest documented cabinetmaker, Fig. 2. Interior of desk. — 13 —