With our highest compliments & utmost honors, Bay Colony Antiques is extremely proud to offer for sale this extraordinary early 19th century Antique Federal period Mahogany chest of drawers / dresser. We’ve owned this for a couple of months and wanted to solidify an attribution before offering this for sale but we’ve exhausted both our private research material and our museum databases. We're confident this is a singular object, and we can’t recall ever seeing a variation of the French Foot quite like this.
We strongly believe this was made in Western Massachusetts, either in Springfield, or the Greenfield / Deerfield area. Our largest warehouse is located in Springfield and the furniture from the area is criminally under appreciated. William Lloyd & Pelatiah Bliss were the most successful cabinet makers in Springfield during the period, yet there are only a handful of labeled or signed examples from both cabinet makers. Most furniture wasn’t labeled or signed, and even if they were a lot of the old pencil script was lost over time or the paper labels either fell off or disintegrated. The drawers have an impressively thin set of hand cut dovetails with the original scribe marks present. The drawer panel is also hand chamfered and was made with two boards which was common in our area with the rear board being narrower than the front. The characteristics of the Mahogany is very similar to a signed William Lloyd table in Historic Deerfield’s collection (item no. HD 2007.25). Because of our location in Springfield we’ve probably handled more Lloyd furniture than any of our contemporaries. We strongly believe this could have been made in his cabinet shop. It is theorized that Lloyd was trained by Chapin and there are a few similarities to another chest in Historic Deerfield’s collection (item no HD 67.120) made by another apprentice of Chapin, Erastus Grant.
The chest is absolutely stunning and we especially love the Mahogany used for the faces because of the natural chatoyancy and the sweeping dark striations caused by mineral deposits when the Mahogany was growing. The chest has an overhung Mahogany top with a beautiful Mahogany cross banded edge. The chest has a nice line inlay around the top edge, drawer faces, and the skirt. The inlay continues from the skirt and envelopes the tall stylized French Feet. As we mentioned above, we’ve never encountered French Feet quite like this and if you’re looking for a rare, unique, piece of period furniture from The Connecticut River Valley we simplify cannot recommend this chest enough. The brasses have been replaced but the replacements are super high quality with an embossed acorn on the pulls and a ribbon with bellflowers motif on the escutcheons. There are also a couple of old repairs to the inlay, but aside from that our only further condition notes would be minor surface wear. The chest measures 43 1/4” wide x 21” deep x 36 1/2” tall.