ON VIEW

Among examples of "pilgrim furniture," the painted chests made and decorated by the Taunton, Massachusetts, drum maker Robert Crossman are among the most distinctive and original treasures of the early colonial period. Although not as expensive or as serviceable as the chests of drawers and high chests then in vogue among affluent urbanites, Crossman's Taunton chests are almost unrivalled in early American furniture for innovation and exuberance of design.

The 1720s and 1730s were a period of tremendous change in the quantity and style of possessions owned by New Englanders. Increasingly affluent and acquisitive households demanded new evidence of their material success. Paint-decorated board chests of inexpensive domestic woods were made in small or rural towns in interior New England at a time when cabinetwork fashioned from imported or exotic domestic hardwoods threatened the livelihood of craftsmen trained in the old techniques. The need to compete spawned an inventive approach to design that is heralded today as one of the great achievements in the history of American furniture making.

The work of Crossman was first recognized and documented by the pioneer antiquarian Esther Stevens Fraser, who discovered his work at an exhibition in Boston in 1925 and subsequently published a landmark study that convincingly attributed a significant group of early painted chests to this previously unknown maker. Half a dozen chests, bearing owner's initials and dates ranging from 1727 to 1742, together with almost two dozen more chests either lacking dates, original decoration, or both, comprise the known body of work attributed to this intriguing maker. During the decade and a half in which paint-decorated chests were popular in Taunton, Crossman probably produced several dozen chests. He was a joiner by trade who built houses and did interior woodwork, and he maintained the specialty in drum making first practiced in Taunton by his grandfather. The methods of the woodworking trade in colonial New England typically were passed on to successive generations within families. Representing the third generation of one of Taunton's most active woodworking families, Robert Crossman was perhaps able to arbitrate the tastes of his clientele by offering unconventional products. The painted chests, first developed when Crossman was just twenty-one years old, represent a unique and apparently successful response to the changing tastes of the time.

Crossman employed a vocabulary of ornament that included trees of life, birds, tulips, scrolling vines, and geometric patterns of densely spaced wavy lines, applied in thick yellow, green (now appearing white), and orange paint on pine finished with a black-on-red painted ground. The chests frequently contain false drawer fronts. Here only one of what looks like three drawers is real, an obvious concession to the growing status attached to multicompartmental chests of drawers. Like many of the Taunton chests, this example is dated and bears the initials of its first owner, "S.A." The chest is believed to have belonged to Sarah Andrews, about whom little is known. To date, all chests bearing the initials of a known owner's name have belonged to females. Like the well-known flower-and-vine decorated "Hadley chests" of the Connecticut Valley, Crossman's paint-decorated chests might have been used as part of the custom in which adolescent girls were provided with a chest containing goods for setting up house. Flowers and other symbols of fertility represent an expectation of fruition at a time when family prosperity and female fertility were entwined.

WNH and KB


REFERENCE

Esther Stevens Fraser. "The Tantalizing Chests of Taunton." Antiques XXIII, no. 4 (April 1933): 135-38.