Day 357 - Early New England furniture

 May 10, 2024

Gallery 708 is reached by a glass-walled elevator (shades of a Hyatt hotel!) that carries me to the third floor. The museum is absolutely jammed today (a new Costume Institute show at the end of the Met Gala week? Student groups descending on New York before the end of the school year?), but I see only four other visitors in this space during the course of an hour or so.

The gallery appears to be the first of many devoted primarily to American furniture. My first reaction is that the upcoming visits will be something of a slog. Instead, today’s visit feels like a homecoming, in two ways.

The gallery centers mainly on furniture made in New England before 1730 Many of the pieces are made of oak and have simple, straight lines; low-relief carving is the principal form of ornamentation. I cry out in delighted surprise (with no one to hear me) when I see a pine chest with two drawers, about 42 inches high, 40 inches wide, and 18 inches deep, that was made in Hampshire County - my home during my adolescence! - between 1700 and 1725. I'm even more amazed to learn that such chests, used to store household textiles and valuables, were popularly called “Hadley chests” after one was found in a house in Hadley. The placard says that “this type may have been created in the Hatfield, Amherst, or Hadley area.”  I think to myself, a bit smugly, that whoever wrote this didn’t know that there was no town of Amherst in the early 18th century; it broke away from Hadley and was separately incorporated only in 1759. I don’t particularly like the floral and vegetal carving that decorates the chest, but presumably its original owners did. 

New Haven has always been something of a second home to me. When I was a child, my family moved around quite a bit, but New Haven was always a true north, the setting for annual visits to my grandmother and aunt. Since David moved there in 1993 to teach at Yale, I’ve made several visits there each year, and boyfriends with Yale affiliations and friends who live there have also warranted trips to the Elm City. So it’s a place with which I have warm associations, and I’m pleased to read that a cupboard I like very much was made there between 1670 and 1700 and that the cupboard exemplifies the “sophisticated craftsmanship available in colonial Connecticut.” The piece, which is perhaps 54 inches high and 40 inches wide, is made of white and red oak, black walnut, and cedar. Its front door has a finely carved rectangular design; the piece's angularity is broken up by spiraling uprights. It’s the item of furniture in this room I would most like to own.

A third piece that catches my attention is an oak armchair made between 1650 and 1700 in eastern Massachusetts. I read that the design for the carved back of the armchair, with its arches and small circles, involved the use of a compass, and I immediately think back to the box I saw in the Egyptian galleries on my second visit to the Met for this project, whose design clearly (to me, anyway) involved the use of a compass. So it feels like the chair represents a return to roots in this way as well.

A number of portraits also line the gallery’s walls.   The Joseph Smibert portrait of Francis Brinley that was the focus of an earlier blog entry has been moved here.  Nearby is a Smibert portrait of Brinley’s wife and infant son, Francis, Jr.  Smibert was skilled in depicting the adults; the baby not so much. Another eye-catching portrait is of a young boy, identify unknown, painted in upstate New York by an artist, also unknown. The child is posed beside a miniature fawn; the fawn, I read, was an important symbol of longevity during an epoch when infant and child mortality was very high.  The boy has shoulder-length blonde hair and is dressed in a very fancy long blue coat coat opened to reveal an embroidered garment underneath.  The paintings here are a reminder that portraits were commissioned by people of wealth and were signifiers of status to their subjects and to others who viewed them.