Museum accessions.

In 1834, twenty-one-year-old Henry Chandler Bowen left his native Woodstock, Connecticut, to seek his fortune in New York City. He returned some twelve years later with a fortune made as a silk wholesaler, a wife, the first of ten children, and plans to build a grand summer house in Woodstock. The result was Roseland Cottage--now a property of Historic New England of Boston--which remains as an important testament to the newly popular Gothic revival style. The design of the house and the surrounding parterre garden reflect the influence on the English-born builder Joseph C. Wells of the architect and landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Its interiors still retain original Lincrusta Walton wall coverings and many of the Gothic revival furnishings, including the crib illustrated here, recently donated by a great-great granddaughter. The walnut crib was presumably acquired for the Bowens' first child, Henry Eliot Bowen, who was born in 1845, and it descended through his family.

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Since the discovery in the 1920s of two tambour desks bearing the label of John and Thomas Seymour, their names have become virtually synonymous with sophisticated neoclassical furniture made in the Boston region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tambour desks are among their most notable products, and today some seventeen have been tied to the shop, one of which was recently acquired by the Saint Louis Art Museum. While not labeled, it shares many elements of design and construction with documented Seymour pieces and is almost identical to an example in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that Robert Mussey, an authority on the Seymours, has called the "most refined and sophisticated of all the [Seymours'] tambour secretaries." Interestingly, inside the tambour section of the desk illustrated are four small drawers inscribed N2 in a florid script that Mussey has identified as Thomas Seymour's hand. He feels the ...