Prickett Desk 2011

19 the desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art insured correct design and detail. The base, to which the shell attaches, with its three carved pinwheels, is original. All three finial plinths are original. The right finial is original. The left finial was copied from the right and the center finial was inspired by the original ball finial on the desk at Amherst. Other customary repairs have been made that include, but are not limited to; the restoration of worn drawer beads the repairing of broken brasses. Credits: We are grateful for generous assistance from Morrison Heckscher and Peter Kenny, The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York, N.Y.; Susan Pikor and Stephen Fisher, Mead Art Gallery, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.; Wendy Cooper, Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware; Deborah Rebuck, Dietrich American Foundation, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pa.; Robert Mussey, furniture conservator and independent scholar in Boston, Mass., many of whose thoughts, research and words are used herein; Kemble Widmer, independent scholar and author, Newburyport, Mass.; and Joyce King, genealogist specializing in Salem, Mass. Footnotes: 1. Morrison Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Late Colonial Period. The Queen Anne and Chippendale Styles (New York: MMA, 1985), cat. no. 181, pp. 276–9. Brasses and finials replaced and the top rear of the bonnet has been altered. This entered the collection with two neo-classical full length carved figures of Plenty and unidentified Allegorical Figure attributed to one of the Skillin(g) family of carvers which probably date from the early 1790s, at least a decade after the secretary’s original manufacture. These were later removed to museum storage and more familiar corkscrew-and-urn type finials substituted, but pictured in Margaretta Lovell, “Boston Blockfront Furniture,” in Walter Muir Whitehill and Brock Jobe, eds. Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974), fig. 87, p. 124; also pictured and discussed in Sylvia Lahvis, “The Skillin Workshop: The Emblematic Image in Federal Boston” (Univ. of Delaware, 1992), unpub. PhD diss., figs. 87–88, pp. 378–9. The form of the original finials is unknown. 2. Charles L. Venable, American Furniture in the Bybee Collection (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), cat. no. 28, pp. 58–63. There are some modifications to the bookcase interior partitions, all of the secondary wood of the drawers, both the base and the drawers of the interior have been replaced, and the finials are replaced.