The Peleg and Lucy Arnold chest of drawers.

The Yale University Art Gallery has underway a comprehensive study of furniture making in Rhode Island from 1636 to 1800 to both identify the makers and interpret the products of the smaller towns as well as the major centers of furniture making in the Narragansett basin. Newport and Providence makers and their work are well known, but that is not the case for the surrounding towns.

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In this light, the discovery that the curly maple chest of drawers shown in Figure 1 was made in rural Exeter, Rhode Island, is significant. Furthermore the chest is rare for being inscribed. The names of Peleg and Lucy Arnold and the date March 22, 1786, are incised and painted along two edges of the top (Figs. 2, 5). (1) The inference is that Peleg made the chest of drawers for his wife Lucy. Peleg Arnold, a fifth generation Rhode Islander, and Lucy Hopkins Arnold (1769-1850) lived in Exeter, a town founded in 1743 from a portion of North Kingston.

A busk (for stiffening the front of a corset) and three silver spoons descended along with the chest, offering additional evidence about the owners of the chest and courtship practices in eighteenth-century America. The busk (Fig. 3) is carved with the initials PA and LH and the date March 3, 1785. Its delicate geometric sawtooth carving repeats the painted patterns on the top of the chest. The obverse of the busk bears an inscription in graphite, "Peleg Arnold/Lucy Hopkins." The style of the penmanship indicates that it was added in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Lucy Hopkins was sixteen when she married Peleg Arnold in Exeter on October 20, 1785. (2) The date on the busk and the date on the chest bracket the date of their marriage and suggest that Peleg made both objects as tokens of love. Since a busk flattened the midriff and pushed up the bosom, Peleg's handiwork and initials would have been close to Lucy's heart. The images of strawberries and a bird perched in a tree, which frame the couple's initials on the busk, underscore the meaning of the gift. Fruit as a metaphor for fertility, and therefore sexuality, is well established in Western culture. The bird as a metaphor for awakening sexuality would have been very familiar to the eighteenth-century viewer. (3)

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Confirmation of the relationship of these objects to one another is offered by one of the three tablespoons (see Fig. 4) that descended with the chest and the busk. The spoon in the center bears the marks of the Newport silversmith Thomas Arnold and the initials H/BM, representing a couple with a surname beginning with H and first names beginning with B and M. There is no doubt that these initials are for Lucy's parents, Beriah Hopkins of West Greenwich, Rhode Island, and Mary Reynolds, whom he married in 1768. Lucy was their first child, born in 1769. (4) Lucy and Peleg Arnold named their third child Beriah Hopkins Arnold for her father. The other two spoons are unmarked but are engraved A/P-L, presumably for Peleg and Lucy Arnold.