On View
Not on viewDesks
Artist
P.E. Almquist
Date1810-1815
Terms
- Desks
- Cherry
- Holly
- Mahogany
- Pine
- Rose
- New England
Dimensions90.74 × 47.59 cm (35 3/4 × 18 3/4 in.)
Credit LineBequest of Mrs. Adams Tolman (1941)
Object numberTH86
DescriptionMahogany, mahogany veneer; holly (possibly) stringing, cherry, pine, rosewood. Inlaid. Bottom: four drawers of graduated size. Original brass pulls and oval escutcheons. Pair of wooden slides with small brass knobs, to support the sloping top of the chest, which is hinged and can be let down when the piece is being used as a desk. The inside of the fall front is covered with green felt. Top: center section with a door, behind which there is a deep compartment with two drawers above. The door has inlay around the edge in a checkered pattern and inlay in the shape of a shield around the key hole. The doors on either side of the center one have late brass pulls which have been put on over the shield shaped inlaid wood around the key holes and each door has a pair of late pierced brass hinges.
This desk was made twenty or thirty years before the work table (Th44) and sofa (Th87) and is representative of an earlier generation of classical taste in American furniture. There is a greater emphasis on line rather than volume, evident particularly in the lines inlaid in the doors in the upper case and the drawers in the lower case, and the contour of the shaped skirt. The thin moldings and high feet contrive to make the desk sit less solidly on the floor than the work table does.
It is difficult to determine where this desk was made. Similar furniture was made in a number of coastal New England communities from Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the north to Providence, Rhode Island in the south, and from any number of inland communities within about fifty miles of Boston. Thoreau may have gotten it in Salem when he worked there for a dry goods merchant, or he may have gotten it in Concord. John Thoreau married Cynthia Dunbar in Concord in 1812; if they acquired it at that time, it may have come from the shop of a craftsman like Nathan Hosmer or William Heywood.
Sophia Thoreau seems to have given Adams Tolman this desk when he was still quite young; it is an uncertain hand that inscribed some of the drawers with "Scarabidae" and "Indian relics," naming the collections that the drawers housed. Tolman seems to have been inspired by Henry Thoreau's example to collect the stone artifacts left in the meadows by the river by the Native Americans who were once in the area.
This desk was made twenty or thirty years before the work table (Th44) and sofa (Th87) and is representative of an earlier generation of classical taste in American furniture. There is a greater emphasis on line rather than volume, evident particularly in the lines inlaid in the doors in the upper case and the drawers in the lower case, and the contour of the shaped skirt. The thin moldings and high feet contrive to make the desk sit less solidly on the floor than the work table does.
It is difficult to determine where this desk was made. Similar furniture was made in a number of coastal New England communities from Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the north to Providence, Rhode Island in the south, and from any number of inland communities within about fifty miles of Boston. Thoreau may have gotten it in Salem when he worked there for a dry goods merchant, or he may have gotten it in Concord. John Thoreau married Cynthia Dunbar in Concord in 1812; if they acquired it at that time, it may have come from the shop of a craftsman like Nathan Hosmer or William Heywood.
Sophia Thoreau seems to have given Adams Tolman this desk when he was still quite young; it is an uncertain hand that inscribed some of the drawers with "Scarabidae" and "Indian relics," naming the collections that the drawers housed. Tolman seems to have been inspired by Henry Thoreau's example to collect the stone artifacts left in the meadows by the river by the Native Americans who were once in the area.
Collections
- Henry David Thoreau Collection
- Furniture
