Delaware Antiques Show 2024

in tilt-top tables. 4 Other British makers applied these suggestions and developed veneering plans with strips of mahogany crotch veneer, sometimes compared to pie wedges or sunbursts. These veneering layouts became wildly popular for Philadelphia center tables, often rimmed with cost-effective gilt stenciling in Grecian foliate patterns rather than brass inlay. In the 1820s, mantle pieces using vivid green and white-veined Mona Marble—from the Welsh quarry once managed by Bullock—were published in Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts . Brass was applied to the mantles like “Buhl work” on imported woods, thereby linking the two materials: veined marble and figured mahogany. If we understand the period’s furniture as classical architecture in miniature, then the mahogany might have been understood by some as a worthy match to marble, and the answer to the aforementioned challenge to makers of center tables in the period. Philadelphians’ dedication to a strong intellectual culture was unshakeable from the eighteenth century well into the antebellum period. The choice aesthetic of that culture was neoclassicism, reflected in the new nation’s models for government. Public structures of blue marble, such as William Strickland’s Second Bank of the United States (1818–24), modeled on the Parthenon, represented this. With its interior laid in black limestone tiles containing fossils, the Philadelphia building’s classicism met with natural wonders, just as the table did. Accompanying the interest in antiquity was a passion for natural history. In 1786, prominent artist Charles Willson Peale added his public-facing museum to the city’s list of cultural institutions; he was intent on its potential as an educational venue. The museum experience presented visitors with aspects of national and natural history in forms such as portrait busts and fossils. Taking after plant specimens, also displayed in the museum, the table’s brass designs are in essence fossilized into it. Blending classical references with the strange allure of imported natural materials put to their limits, the table’s maker drew from an inborn curiosity as well as observation of the culture of the city around him. Indeed, few places could have encouraged that type of productive introspection but Philadelphia. Steven Baltsas, Lois F. McNeil Fellow, Winterthur Program in American Material Culture 4 Bullock is referenced in Carswell Rush Berlin, “Classical Furniture in Federal Philadelphia,” Antiques and Fine Art (Spring 2007): 195. — 12 —