Living with antiques: New England begins at home.

The New England couple who owns the collection featured here was first lured into the sport of collecting thirty years ago by the gift of a copy of Wallace Nutting's Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (1921) and a subsequent friendship with collectors who lived in a period house. Ten years later they found the perfect setting for their evolving collection: a house that was built by 1697, was slightly enlarged between 1725 and 1730 when the roof was raised, and has remained largely unchanged since then.

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The collectors' ambition has been to live with objects that date between 1675 and 1725, bracketing the dates when their house was built. Therefore they have furnished it with objects that could have been there originally--as confirmed by family history, archaeological evidence, regional studies, and household inventories. Geographically the collection concentrates on Boston and the North Shore of Massachusetts. The primary focus has been on furniture, with complementary collections of metalwares, ceramics, glassware, textiles, and prints.

Today the collection illustrates the work of every major seventeenth-century Massachusetts cabinet shop--from the sophisticated, cosmopolitan shop traditions of Boston north to the major provincial centers of Cambridge, Salem, Ipswich, and Newbury. Design, craftsmanship, and condition have been the gauges for inclusion. As perennial students, the collectors believe in the importance of comparative study--meaning that "you can never have one of anything." If many of the decorative arts in this collection might have been owned by the New World elite, the collectors have also made an effort to seek out the more difficult to find, proverbial, "meal-in-the-firkin" type object. They are collectors who are also interested in history--in the complex, multilayered, often mystery-filled narrative of seventeenth-century New England and the interrelationships and intersections that compose the warp and weft of that story. (1)

The shelves of the North Shore cupboard in the kitchen (Fig. 1) are lined with a fascinating array of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ceramics, glass, and metalwares. The three-inch-tall English pewter "cricket-ball" teapot in the center of the middle shelf, about 1700, demonstrates how precious its contents were at the beginning of the eighteenth century. (2) Among the objects of documented local interest is the slip-decorated posset pot at the right on the middle shelf, which has a history of ownership near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Immediately to its right is a honey pot that was found in Exeter, New Hampshire. The splint basket, pierced and lined with purple flocked wallpaper, seen on the lower shelf, was found in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and dates from about 1725. The turned maple and ash great chair of about 1700 is attributed to the Plymouth, Massachusetts, turner and carpenter Ephraim Tinkham II (1649-1713). It is one of only two known examples with a sawn slat back; the other one is also in this collection, although not illustrated here. Distinguishing features of Tinkham's shop include the ball-reel-ball finials, the ovoid handgrips, the cove-ball-cove turnings on the posts, and the instepped pillar turning on the front posts above the seat rail. (3) An example of a once-humble and now-rare everyday object is the brown Nottingham bowl visible at the far left in Figure 2--on top of a chest attributed to Thomas Dennis of Ipswich, Massachusetts. (4) The chest, which retains many traces of red and blue paint, is notable for its original brackets and height. The box on the chest is attributed to William Searle (1611-1667), Thomas Dennis's presumed master. (5) Its distinctive carved frieze is reminiscent of the back panel of a great chair in the collection of the Danvers Historical Society in Danvers, Massachusetts. (6) On top of the box is a tin-glazed earthenware punch bowl dated 1728 with a verse inside that counsels, "Drink Fair, Dont Swear."

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