Colonial Era Cabinet Maker Uncovered

Fellow furniture appraiser Richard Merritt of Merritt Appraisals in Alexandria, VA forwarded this NY Times article by Eve Kahn on Salem, MA cabinet maker Nataniel Gould.

The full story will be published in the 2008 edition of American Furniture. According to the NY Times article the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston since1835 has had in their possession several account books with names and figures, yet the scholars who looked at the account books over the years never figured out what they were or who they belonged to. That is until last year. What was discovered is that Salem, Mass cabinet maker was much more prolific than previously thought,

Kahn states This month the solution to the mystery is being announced with fanfare: Nathaniel Gould, a cabinetmaker in Salem, Mass., wrote those entries, and they represent thousands of furniture commissions shipped worldwide. Gould was previously thought to have produced perhaps a few dozen pieces. The ledger discovery could change attributions of carved mahogany, walnut and cedar objects for scores of museums, private collections and stores.

Kahn continues Scholars have long known that a Nathaniel Gould made furniture in Salem and died in 1781 at the age of 47. His few identified pieces, mostly unsigned, have a distinctive style: Gould liked to carve pinwheels and scallop seashells along furniture edges and often built drawers with swollen profiles called bombé fronts.

David Filipov of the Boston Globe also comments on the discovery. Solving the puzzle of who made the furniture is also "giving us a much greater understanding of life at the top of the economic scale," said one of the researchers, Kemble Widmer of Newburyport, who has studied Salem furniture for two decades. "It's identified positively a superior craftsman, it tells us how he did business, and it gives us an idea of how ornately the very, very wealthy decorated their homes."

Widmer's search began when a Pennsylvania antique dealer asked him and Joyce King of Wakefield, who has long studied Salem history, to trace the origin of the 18th-century desk and bookcase he had acquired.

The opulent attributes of the artifact - the detailed design of the feet, the bonnet top, the expensive mahogany wood, the decoration on the top of the board, the distinctively carved shell of the center drop - were characteristics shared by a handful of furniture pieces known to have been made in Salem.

But the only existing evidence of Gould's connection to the work was a signature on a block-front desk and bookcase on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Next to Gould's signature, however, someone had scribbled the phrase "not his work.

For those of us who love American Colonial period the two newspaper articles are very interesting reads. I look forward for the American Furniture journal to publish (usually sometime in January, it is listed on publisher Chipstone site, but is not yet available for order, nor is it on Amazon) for the complete details. The 2006 edition had several great articles on the miss-attribution of the Peter Scott shop in Williamsburg and the Walker brothers. The discovery changed the scholarship and attribution of much of Scott's work. It will be interesting to see how the Gould discovery may impact attributions and collections.

To read the NY Times article click HERE, to read the Boston Globe article click HERE