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Lot Essay
This chest with drawer by the shop tradition of the famous joiner Thomas Dennis (1638-1706), of Ipswich, Massachusetts, is an exceedingly rare and beautifully preserved example of this master's work. The present lot is the only Dennis chest to retain its original drawer, and the chest also retains the original pinning, red-and-black painted decoration in the carving, and original surface. Of the twenty-odd known Dennis chests, twelve are now in institutional collections.
The chest was first published by Irving P. Lyon in 1937, but it disappeared from the scholarly literature until 1982, when it was placed on loan at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and published in the landmark exhibition catalog, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century. The bibliography regarding Thomas Dennis has expanded exponentially since the Lyon articles first identified him in 1937. In the 1960s, Helen Park published two articles in The Magazine Antiques that identified other furniture makers in Essex County. In particular, Park expressed interest in the possible contributions of William Searle (died 1667), Grace Dennis's first husband, to the shop tradition. Although Dennis's English origins are not known, Searle was from Ottery St. Mary, a prosperous suburb of the Devon capital Exeter (Irving P. Lyon, "The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts Part II. Florid Type. Miscellaneous Examples," The Magazine Antiques (December 1937), pp. 300-301; Helen Park, "Thomas Dennis, Ipswich joiner: a re-examination," The Magazine Antiques (July 1960), pp. 40-44). Park's work prompted Benno M. Forman to write his Winterthur thesis on Essex County joiners and joinery between 1966 and 1968. During that same period, Dr. Abbott Lowell Cummings saw chests in Devon that closely resembled Dennis's known work (fig. 1), and scholars began pursuing the origins of the Dennis style in that area. In object entries for New England Begins, Robert F. Trent attributed some of the Dennis family furniture to William Searle (Benno M. Forman, "The Seventeenth Century Case Furniture of Essex County, Massachusetts, and Its Makers," (M. A. thesis: University of Delaware, 1968); John T. Kirk, American Furniture & The British Tradition To 1830 (New York, 1982), pp. 11 and 378; Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 514-519, cat. nos. 474-478).
All these speculations were overthrown by the appearance in 1982 of the Staniford-Heard chest, now at Winterthur Museum (fig. 2). Not only is the chest almost certainly by Thomas Dennis himself, it demonstrated that the Staniford-Heard chest-of-drawers, also at Winterthur Museum, was made by another shop tradition. The present consensus is that all the surviving furniture is to be attributed to Dennis, his two sons, his documented apprentice Josias Lyndon, and perhaps several other unidentified apprentices (Robert Blair St. George, "The Staniford Family Chest," Maine Antique Digest, vol. 11, no. 2 (February 1983), pp. 16B-18B). A study of the Dennis chests by Robert Tarule emphasized the size of the tenons and other construction traits, as well as carving hands (a group of research and field notes compiled by Robert Blair St. George and Robert F. Trent (currently in the possesson of Robert F. Trent) was used by Robert Tarule in writing his dissertation, "The Joined Furniture Of William Searle And Thomas Dennis: A Shop-Based Inquiry Into The Woodworking Technology Of The Seventeenth Century Joiner" (Ph. D. diss: The Union Institute, 1992). See also Robert Tarule, The Artisan of Ipswich Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England (Baltimore, 2004), passim).
The origins of the Dennis tradition in Devon have received systematic study by Anthony Wells-Cole, Samuel Tuke, Robert Tarule, and Donald P. White III. Wells-Cole traced the origins of the style back to London work of the 1590-1620 period. Tuke undertook an analysis of Devon shop traditions around Exeter and Tarule and White claim to have identified English chests made in the same shop where Dennis trained (Anthony Wells-Cole, "An Oak Bed at Montacute: a Study in Mannerist Decoration," Furniture History, Vol. 17 (1981), pp. 1-19 and plates 1-29B; Samuel Tuke, "The American connection: an investigation into a regional tradition of furniture making in East Devon," (Ph. D. diss.: Southampton Institute, 2005); Robert Tarule and Donald P. White III, Discovering Dennis The Search for Thomas Dennis Among the Artisans of Exeter (Exeter, UK, 2009), passim).
--Robert F. Trent, July 2011
"We entered the old kitchen and there was the chest, the top covered with yellow cucumbers which had gone to seed. This was something which made me hold my breath. An oak chest about four feet high and six feet long with arabesque figures and the slight wash of blue and of red which one finds in Spanish and Arabic furniture."
-Mrs. Sylvanus Reed (nee Caroline Gallup), "The Reed Chest" (Unpublished manuscript, dated 1906), reciting her discovery of the chest in 1880.
These words were written by Caroline (Gallup) Reed (1821-1914) (fig. 4) in 1906, recounting her discovery of the chest in a homestead in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire that had previously been built and occupied by Brigadier General James Reed (1724-1807) (fig. 3), the great grandfather of her late husband, Sylvanus Reed (1811/2-1870/1). Believing the chest to have been owned by her husband's ancestors, Mrs. Reed purchased the chest for $10 in 1880 from the tenant farmer who occupied Gen. Reed's homestead. See Mrs. Sylvanus Reed, "The Reed Chest" (Unpublished manuscript, dated 1906) and Anna Dewitt (Reed) Parsons, "The Story of the Reed Chest" in Stories About Some of My New England Ancestors (Privately printed, 1957), pp. 37-38 (fig. 5).
Made in Ipswich, Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century and probably later owned by Gen. James Reed, this chest may have been made for Mariah (Moriah) Smith (bap. 1664) of Ipswich and Joseph Collins (1642-1724) of Lynn. She was the great grandmother of Mary (Molly) Farrar (1741/2-after 1810), the second wife of Gen. James Reed. Research into the ancestors of James Reed, his first wife, Abigail Hinds (1723-1791) and others of Mary Farrar, has revealed no other individuals living in the Ipswich area during the late seventeenth century, thus making Mariah (Smith) Collins the probable first owner. She was the daughter of John Smith (1622-1672), a farmer who emigrated from Hadleigh, Suffolk County, England to Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1635 at the age of thirteen. In all likelihood, the chest was made around the time of her marriage to Joseph Collins, a house carpenter and prosperous landowner of Lynn, Massachusetts in 1684; as her father had died by this time, it is possible it was commissioned by Collins (in his will, Collins does not mention individual furnishing items, but his wife "Merryah" receives use of the "indoor moveables" and his daughter, Mary (Collins) Farrar receives twelve pounds; Joseph Collins will, Essex County Massachusetts Probate Records, file 6082, available at The Massachusetts State Archives). The chest then probably descended to the homestead of Gen. James Reed through three generations in the Farrar family in Lynn, Framingham, Massachusetts and Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, as listed above under Provenance. For the Smith and Collins family, see research of Mr. Linton E. Love, https://www.smith-genealogy.com/. For the Farrar family, see William Barry, A History of Framingham, Massachusetts (Boston, 1847), pp. 90, 241; Rev. Josiah Lafayette Seward, A History of the Town of Sullivan, New Hampshire, 1777-1917, vol. 2 (circa 1921), p. 964; Timothy Farrar, Memoir of the Farrar Family, vol. 2 (1986), p. 7; https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSvcid=40995&GRid=1956 4731&; https://www.fitzhistoricalsociety.org/early0settlers/earlysettlers.htm l.
A celebrated soldier in the Revolutionary War, James Reed may have owned this chest in his Fitzwilliam house during his marriage to Mary Farrar in the 1790s. In 1765, he received a land grant in Monadnock IV, later Fitzwilliam, where he built the town's second house, a large two-story residence that served as the site for the town's early proprietors' meetings and first religious services; the house was also run by Reed as an inn and tavern. The house is said to have been about a mile northwest of the village, on the Old Military Road and was still standing when Mrs. Sylvanus Reed visited in 1880. A Lieutenant Colonel during the French and Indian Wars, Reed rose to prominence during the Revolutionary War. Upon the War's outbreak, he raised and led several companies of soldiers from New Hampshire to support the patriot cause near Charlestown, Massachusetts, and supposedly was the first officer of his rank on the field on the morning of June 17, 1775, the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and after the day's bloody events, the last officer to leave the field. He continued to serve in the Continental Army in New York and marched to Fort Ticonderoga, where due to a form of malaria, he lost his eyesight in July 1776. He then retired from active duty, but before doing so was appointed Brigadier General upon the recommendation of George Washington. Reed resided in Fitzwilliam until 1800, when he and his second wife, Mary Farrar moved to Lunenburg (Fitchburg) where he died in 1807 and she was still living in 1810. From 1800 to 1880, the chest presumably remained in James Reed's Fitzwilliam house and owned by subsequent occupants of the house. These occupants are unknown and the farmer from whom Mrs. Sylvanus Reed purchased the chest is recorded as saying he moved into the house in about 1850. For James Reed, see Vicki E. D. Flanders, "Brigadier General James Reed" History Packet No. 9 (Historical Society of Cheshire County, 2007), available at https://www.hsccnh.org/educationhp/hp9.cfm.
After its acquisition in 1880, the chest was subsequently owned by successive generations of the Reed family of New York. Mrs. Sylvanus Reed, who purchased the chest, was born Caroline Gallup in 1821 in Albany, New York. In 1851, she married Rev. Sylvanus Reed (1811/2-1870/1), Gen. James Reed's great grandson, in Albany. The couple moved to New York City where in 1864 she established the Reed School, a renowned school for girls. In 1895, she purchased a summer home, Redemont, near Navesink, New Jersey and was a founder of the Monmouth County Historical Association. As stated in her 1906 manuscript, she gave the chest to her eldest son, Dr. Sylvanus A. Reed (b. 1854-living 1937) and he owned the chest when it was published by Irving P. Lyon in 1937. By 1957, it was owned by his sister, Anna Dewitt (Reed) Parsons (1858-after 1957), when she published a book on the family (fig. 5), including a section on the chest in which she states after a discussion of its production in Europe or America, "Whatever its origin, the chest is now one of my treasured possessions." The chest then passed down to her granddaughter, Anne Barclay (Parsons) Priest (1927-2010) from whose estate it is being consigned at auction. See "Mrs. S. G. Reed dies at 93," and obituary column, New York Times, November 18 and 19, 1914; John D. Gallup, Genealogical History of the Gallup Family (Hartford, CT, 1893), pp. 218-220; https://www.archive.org/stream/officerscommitte00monm/officerscommitte00 monm_djvu.txt;
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/reedcg.html; Parsons, p. 38.
The chest was first published by Irving P. Lyon in 1937, but it disappeared from the scholarly literature until 1982, when it was placed on loan at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and published in the landmark exhibition catalog, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century. The bibliography regarding Thomas Dennis has expanded exponentially since the Lyon articles first identified him in 1937. In the 1960s, Helen Park published two articles in The Magazine Antiques that identified other furniture makers in Essex County. In particular, Park expressed interest in the possible contributions of William Searle (died 1667), Grace Dennis's first husband, to the shop tradition. Although Dennis's English origins are not known, Searle was from Ottery St. Mary, a prosperous suburb of the Devon capital Exeter (Irving P. Lyon, "The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts Part II. Florid Type. Miscellaneous Examples," The Magazine Antiques (December 1937), pp. 300-301; Helen Park, "Thomas Dennis, Ipswich joiner: a re-examination," The Magazine Antiques (July 1960), pp. 40-44). Park's work prompted Benno M. Forman to write his Winterthur thesis on Essex County joiners and joinery between 1966 and 1968. During that same period, Dr. Abbott Lowell Cummings saw chests in Devon that closely resembled Dennis's known work (fig. 1), and scholars began pursuing the origins of the Dennis style in that area. In object entries for New England Begins, Robert F. Trent attributed some of the Dennis family furniture to William Searle (Benno M. Forman, "The Seventeenth Century Case Furniture of Essex County, Massachusetts, and Its Makers," (M. A. thesis: University of Delaware, 1968); John T. Kirk, American Furniture & The British Tradition To 1830 (New York, 1982), pp. 11 and 378; Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 514-519, cat. nos. 474-478).
All these speculations were overthrown by the appearance in 1982 of the Staniford-Heard chest, now at Winterthur Museum (fig. 2). Not only is the chest almost certainly by Thomas Dennis himself, it demonstrated that the Staniford-Heard chest-of-drawers, also at Winterthur Museum, was made by another shop tradition. The present consensus is that all the surviving furniture is to be attributed to Dennis, his two sons, his documented apprentice Josias Lyndon, and perhaps several other unidentified apprentices (Robert Blair St. George, "The Staniford Family Chest," Maine Antique Digest, vol. 11, no. 2 (February 1983), pp. 16B-18B). A study of the Dennis chests by Robert Tarule emphasized the size of the tenons and other construction traits, as well as carving hands (a group of research and field notes compiled by Robert Blair St. George and Robert F. Trent (currently in the possesson of Robert F. Trent) was used by Robert Tarule in writing his dissertation, "The Joined Furniture Of William Searle And Thomas Dennis: A Shop-Based Inquiry Into The Woodworking Technology Of The Seventeenth Century Joiner" (Ph. D. diss: The Union Institute, 1992). See also Robert Tarule, The Artisan of Ipswich Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England (Baltimore, 2004), passim).
The origins of the Dennis tradition in Devon have received systematic study by Anthony Wells-Cole, Samuel Tuke, Robert Tarule, and Donald P. White III. Wells-Cole traced the origins of the style back to London work of the 1590-1620 period. Tuke undertook an analysis of Devon shop traditions around Exeter and Tarule and White claim to have identified English chests made in the same shop where Dennis trained (Anthony Wells-Cole, "An Oak Bed at Montacute: a Study in Mannerist Decoration," Furniture History, Vol. 17 (1981), pp. 1-19 and plates 1-29B; Samuel Tuke, "The American connection: an investigation into a regional tradition of furniture making in East Devon," (Ph. D. diss.: Southampton Institute, 2005); Robert Tarule and Donald P. White III, Discovering Dennis The Search for Thomas Dennis Among the Artisans of Exeter (Exeter, UK, 2009), passim).
--Robert F. Trent, July 2011
"We entered the old kitchen and there was the chest, the top covered with yellow cucumbers which had gone to seed. This was something which made me hold my breath. An oak chest about four feet high and six feet long with arabesque figures and the slight wash of blue and of red which one finds in Spanish and Arabic furniture."
-Mrs. Sylvanus Reed (nee Caroline Gallup), "The Reed Chest" (Unpublished manuscript, dated 1906), reciting her discovery of the chest in 1880.
These words were written by Caroline (Gallup) Reed (1821-1914) (fig. 4) in 1906, recounting her discovery of the chest in a homestead in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire that had previously been built and occupied by Brigadier General James Reed (1724-1807) (fig. 3), the great grandfather of her late husband, Sylvanus Reed (1811/2-1870/1). Believing the chest to have been owned by her husband's ancestors, Mrs. Reed purchased the chest for $10 in 1880 from the tenant farmer who occupied Gen. Reed's homestead. See Mrs. Sylvanus Reed, "The Reed Chest" (Unpublished manuscript, dated 1906) and Anna Dewitt (Reed) Parsons, "The Story of the Reed Chest" in Stories About Some of My New England Ancestors (Privately printed, 1957), pp. 37-38 (fig. 5).
Made in Ipswich, Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century and probably later owned by Gen. James Reed, this chest may have been made for Mariah (Moriah) Smith (bap. 1664) of Ipswich and Joseph Collins (1642-1724) of Lynn. She was the great grandmother of Mary (Molly) Farrar (1741/2-after 1810), the second wife of Gen. James Reed. Research into the ancestors of James Reed, his first wife, Abigail Hinds (1723-1791) and others of Mary Farrar, has revealed no other individuals living in the Ipswich area during the late seventeenth century, thus making Mariah (Smith) Collins the probable first owner. She was the daughter of John Smith (1622-1672), a farmer who emigrated from Hadleigh, Suffolk County, England to Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1635 at the age of thirteen. In all likelihood, the chest was made around the time of her marriage to Joseph Collins, a house carpenter and prosperous landowner of Lynn, Massachusetts in 1684; as her father had died by this time, it is possible it was commissioned by Collins (in his will, Collins does not mention individual furnishing items, but his wife "Merryah" receives use of the "indoor moveables" and his daughter, Mary (Collins) Farrar receives twelve pounds; Joseph Collins will, Essex County Massachusetts Probate Records, file 6082, available at The Massachusetts State Archives). The chest then probably descended to the homestead of Gen. James Reed through three generations in the Farrar family in Lynn, Framingham, Massachusetts and Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, as listed above under Provenance. For the Smith and Collins family, see research of Mr. Linton E. Love, https://www.smith-genealogy.com/. For the Farrar family, see William Barry, A History of Framingham, Massachusetts (Boston, 1847), pp. 90, 241; Rev. Josiah Lafayette Seward, A History of the Town of Sullivan, New Hampshire, 1777-1917, vol. 2 (circa 1921), p. 964; Timothy Farrar, Memoir of the Farrar Family, vol. 2 (1986), p. 7; https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSvcid=40995&GRid=1956 4731&; https://www.fitzhistoricalsociety.org/early0settlers/earlysettlers.htm l.
A celebrated soldier in the Revolutionary War, James Reed may have owned this chest in his Fitzwilliam house during his marriage to Mary Farrar in the 1790s. In 1765, he received a land grant in Monadnock IV, later Fitzwilliam, where he built the town's second house, a large two-story residence that served as the site for the town's early proprietors' meetings and first religious services; the house was also run by Reed as an inn and tavern. The house is said to have been about a mile northwest of the village, on the Old Military Road and was still standing when Mrs. Sylvanus Reed visited in 1880. A Lieutenant Colonel during the French and Indian Wars, Reed rose to prominence during the Revolutionary War. Upon the War's outbreak, he raised and led several companies of soldiers from New Hampshire to support the patriot cause near Charlestown, Massachusetts, and supposedly was the first officer of his rank on the field on the morning of June 17, 1775, the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and after the day's bloody events, the last officer to leave the field. He continued to serve in the Continental Army in New York and marched to Fort Ticonderoga, where due to a form of malaria, he lost his eyesight in July 1776. He then retired from active duty, but before doing so was appointed Brigadier General upon the recommendation of George Washington. Reed resided in Fitzwilliam until 1800, when he and his second wife, Mary Farrar moved to Lunenburg (Fitchburg) where he died in 1807 and she was still living in 1810. From 1800 to 1880, the chest presumably remained in James Reed's Fitzwilliam house and owned by subsequent occupants of the house. These occupants are unknown and the farmer from whom Mrs. Sylvanus Reed purchased the chest is recorded as saying he moved into the house in about 1850. For James Reed, see Vicki E. D. Flanders, "Brigadier General James Reed" History Packet No. 9 (Historical Society of Cheshire County, 2007), available at https://www.hsccnh.org/educationhp/hp9.cfm.
After its acquisition in 1880, the chest was subsequently owned by successive generations of the Reed family of New York. Mrs. Sylvanus Reed, who purchased the chest, was born Caroline Gallup in 1821 in Albany, New York. In 1851, she married Rev. Sylvanus Reed (1811/2-1870/1), Gen. James Reed's great grandson, in Albany. The couple moved to New York City where in 1864 she established the Reed School, a renowned school for girls. In 1895, she purchased a summer home, Redemont, near Navesink, New Jersey and was a founder of the Monmouth County Historical Association. As stated in her 1906 manuscript, she gave the chest to her eldest son, Dr. Sylvanus A. Reed (b. 1854-living 1937) and he owned the chest when it was published by Irving P. Lyon in 1937. By 1957, it was owned by his sister, Anna Dewitt (Reed) Parsons (1858-after 1957), when she published a book on the family (fig. 5), including a section on the chest in which she states after a discussion of its production in Europe or America, "Whatever its origin, the chest is now one of my treasured possessions." The chest then passed down to her granddaughter, Anne Barclay (Parsons) Priest (1927-2010) from whose estate it is being consigned at auction. See "Mrs. S. G. Reed dies at 93," and obituary column, New York Times, November 18 and 19, 1914; John D. Gallup, Genealogical History of the Gallup Family (Hartford, CT, 1893), pp. 218-220; https://www.archive.org/stream/officerscommitte00monm/officerscommitte00 monm_djvu.txt;
https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/reedcg.html; Parsons, p. 38.