Object Type: Decorative Art

Medium and Support: Mahogany and white pine on mahogany with brass pulls

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum Purchase

Accession Number: 2014.12

This four-drawer chest of drawers from New Bedford, Massachusetts came home to the Florence Griswold Museum with special insights into the early Federal period when it was constructed, and the twentieth century when it came to Old Lyme. The chest retains an interior graphite inscription reading: “John Darnel New Bedford 1818.” This simple phrase identifies the maker of the chest, the place where he worked, and the year when it was constructed. Signed pieces of New England furniture are exceptionally rare, doubly so when the maker is a largely obscure historical figure like Darnel about whom little else is known. In the early nineteenth century, bolstered by wealth from the whaling industry in its active port, the small city of New Bedford experienced a flourishing of Neoclassical design in its civic, religious, and domestic architecture. In Moby-Dick (1851), Ishmael observes that, “nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.” That exuberant embrace of the popular style of the day is clearly seen in this 1818 chest of drawers joined in the fashionable neoclassical style of the early republic. Emulating British neoclassical design of the late eighteenth century, the cabinetmakers who created pieces like this one looked to Ancient Rome and Greece to inspire the simplified forms and restrained ornament of pieces like this. Where present—as in the arched silhouette of the lower edge of the sides, ogee-curved silhouette of the lower front, splayed feet, and richly luminous book matched mahogany veneer—ornament is made integral to the case. In the twentieth century, this chest of drawers was owned by Miss Florence Griswold in Old Lyme. Is it unknown how it came into her home, but she owned it at the time of her death in 1937. In 1938 when her possessions were auctioned, this chest was sold to an antiques dealer in Essex, Conn. It changed hands twice since that time before coming back to Florence Griswold’s house.