AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 117 This high quality transformation was generously funded by the Richard C. von Hess Foundation, the Coby Foundation, the Leonore Smart Wetherill Fund for Decorative Arts Scholarship at Stenton, the Stenton Restoration Fund, and Hannah Lowell Henderson. All images Courtesy of The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at STENTON, unless otherwise noted. All photos of the restored yellow chamber are by Jere Paolini. 1. James Logan (1674–1751) emigrated from Bristol, England, with William Penn in 1699 and became Penn’s Secretary. Logan was also a merchant, Mayor of Philadelphia, chief justice, scientist, and scholar. 2. The idea of maple for bedchambers was not new. See Adam Bowett, Woods in British Furniture Making, 1400–1900 . (Wetherby, UK: Oblong Creative, Ltd., 2012), 153. 3. James Logan’s nearly three thousand-volume library remains intact at the Library Company of Philadelphia. James and Sarah Read Logan slept in the first floor lodging room due to James’ broken hip. 4. We may swap the rope for chain or iron rods for a rigid hold. 5. Little evidence of Colonial North American flying tester bedsteads survives. Ralph Harvard shared photos of architectural cornices set into the plaster ceiling of a chamber at Westover, built ca.1750, and from Pemberton Hall in Salisbury, Maryland, built 1741, which features pendant bobbins at the cornice corners to hold iron curtain rods. A Baltimore Museum of Art period room displays a bed under a built-in painted cornice. The Newbold family farmhouse near Chesterfield, New Jersey, included round iron hooks in the ceilings of two bed chambers in a 1769 addition to the house, and the 1774 Isaac Haines House in Cecil County, Maryland, has four square-cornered iron hooks in the ceiling of one of its chambers. 6. The tape is similar to one on a ca. 1725 valance in the Peabody Essex Museum. Abbott Lowell Cummings, Bed Hangings: A Treatise on Fabrics and Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650–1850 . (Boston: SPNEA, 1994, original edition 1961), Figure 9. A reproduction of the Peabody Essex tape covers the seams of a Boston Easy Chair. See Frances Gruber Safford, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Volume 1), The Early Colonial Period: The Seventeenth-Century and William and Mary Styles . (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), catalog entry 39, footnote 6, 106-107. 7. While the precise provenance of the Walnford cornice is undocumented, it sits atop a later four poster bedstead, all painted gray. The baroque curves and bold projecting corners of the cornice suggest its origin in the first half of the eighteenth century. If the de-upholstered soft wood cornice indeed descended in the Waln family, their status as a high-ranking, Philadelphia-based, Quaker mercantile family supports use of this cornice as a basis for the re-created flying tester bedstead. 8. Sarah Read Logan moved to a Philadelphia town- house after her husband’s death, taking many furnish- ings from Stenton with her that returned to Stenton after her death in 1754. Although not of Stenton, her inventory offers details that shed light on Stenton’s furnishings in her generation. 9. Rooms painted with colors meant to suggest wood were a common finish scheme in the first half of the eighteenth century. See Ian C. Bristow, Architectural Colour in British Interiors, 1615–1840 . (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 34–35. Fig. 7: Striped maple high chest of drawers, ca. 1738, Philadelphia. Along with its paired dressing table, this Spanish-footed chest was inventoried in the yellow lodging room in 1752, valued at £7. The cut window seats on either side of the rear legs suggest that this pier, opposite the entry to the room, is the historic location for the high chest.