Federal Inlaid and Figured Mahogany Serpentine Sideboard

Object Details

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Federal Inlaid and Figured Mahogany Sideboard

Unknown
ca. 1795-1805

wood; mahogany; mahogany veneer; satinwood; eastern white pine; yellow-poplar

Object Essay

By the end of the 18th century, the sideboard had largely taken the place of the pier table as the object for serving food in America’s fashionable dining rooms. Having first appeared in the 1770s in England, sideboards were featured in the 1788 issue of the Cabinet-Maker’s London Book of Prices, the same year that George Hepplewhite illustrated a sideboard in his Guide.^{1_{Hepplewhite, pls. 29–34, wrote: “The great utility of this piece; has procured it a very general reception; and the convenience it affords renders a dining-room incomplete without a sideboard.”}}

This graceful, six-legged New York sideboard, while restrained in amount of inlaid ornament, is a typical New York form: serpentine in shape, with an overhanging top drawer and varying positions of drawers, doors, legs, inlays, and cross-bandings.^{2_{With few exceptions, a sideboard illustrated in Sack Collection, 27, is identical in shape and use of inlay to this example.}}

Despite the overall uniformity of sideboard forms, a wide variety of options were available to the buyer and were listed in detail in the 1802 New York Cabinetmakers’ Book of Prices. For example, the legs on this sideboard, outlined in delicate astragal-end stringing, face frontally, while other New York sideboards have canted ones. The end panels on this sideboard are convex, while others are concave. All inlays on this example form astragal-cornered rectangles, compared to the more typical circle, oval, rectangle, or combination of geometric forms.

Compared to the extravagant sideboard made by Mills and Deming in 1794, the Department of State’s example is far more understated, though both express the essence of New York Federal furniture.^{3_{This sideboard, in a private collection, is illustrated in Tracy et al., no. 4. Its multiple extras would have made it very costly.}} Even those New York sideboards with less elaborate inlays than the flamboyant Mills and Deming example are frequently highly decorative, thanks to their sharply contrasting light-and-dark wood inlays in a variety of geometric forms.^{4_{Fitzgerald 1982, 103, fig. V–41. This sideboard is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.}} Like a similar sideboard owned by the Van Cortlandt family, the Collection’s sideboard “relies on the use of carefully selected mahogany veneers for its chief decoration.”^{5_{Butler 1983, 76, no. 90.}} Although the brasses are not original, they are of the period and express the pacifist sentiments pervasive in the United States in the early years of the Republic—a dove with a laurel leaf in his beak surmounted by the inscription “PEACE.”

Page Talbott

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.