Museum accessions.(George Mason's Gunston Hall, Virginia)(Brief Article)

A bout 1755 the Virginia statesman George Mason began building Gunston Hall, the fine brick house in Fairfax County that became his primary residence for the rest of his life and which has long been open to the public. Recently the museum staff studied all known information about Mason's household belongings and established a plan to acquire appropriate objects that were owned by him or reflect those he probably owned. One of the most important objects the museum sought was a desk-and-bookcase, for every single one of the hundreds of inventories of elite Chesapeake Bay region households the staff had studied included at least one, and Mason himself mentioned that he owned one in a letter dated June 1, 1787. Gunston Hall was most fortunate to acquire the example shown here, attributed to John Selden, who was apprenticed to John Brown, a cabinetmaker in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1756, and who then worked variously in Norfolk, Hampton, and Bland-ford, Virginia In its workmanship and style, the desk-and bookcase exem plifies the neat and plain style most often preferred by well-to-do householders in the Chesapeake Bay region such as Mason.

Three of the articles in this issue (pp. 102-111, 140-149, and 150-157) are dedicated to Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, former associate curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, who died late last year. As these dedications imply her influence on American nineteenth-century decorative arts scholarship was profound, a fact further acknowledged by two recent donations to the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing in her honor. One is the pier table labeled by Joseph Meeks and Sons of New York City that is illustrated on page 110, Plate XII. The other is the unusual fall-front secretary illustrated here, at the lower right. Roughly contemporary with the pier table, it was also made in New York City, although by whom ...