A Grecian card table by William Fisk and Thomas Wightman of Boston.

Well-documented furniture inspires new scholarship, which sometimes raises as many new questions as it answers. A mahogany card table bearing the stenciled mark of the Boston cabinetmaker William Fisk and the signature of the carver Thomas Wightman, recently acquired by Historic New England in Boston, is a case in point (Figs. 1-3). (1) One of several basic questions concerns what to call its style. Over the last twenty-five years, furniture historians have called similar card tables Empire, classical, neoclassical, classical revival, and Greco-Roman revival. Period references suggest that early nineteenth-century furniture makers who worked in this style called it ...