A recently discovered Rhode Island furniture maker, Ichabod Cole.

One of the first discoveries made by Yale University's ongoing project to record Rhode Island furniture makers and their products created between 1636 and 1800 was revealed in the pages of this magazine a year ago. (1) Since then, as we have continued to expand and fund this comprehensive resource, known formally as the Yale University Rhode Island Furniture Archive, or YURIFA, new findings have come to light, including the exciting identification of a previously unknown maker, who can be tied to three desk-and-bookcases.

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During the past year, while my colleague Dennis Carr and I were visiting a pair of collectors to view a tall clock by the Newport clockmaker James Wady (w. 1740-d.1759), we noticed that they also owned a Rhode Island desk-and-bookcase (Figs. 1a and 1b). It had glazed doors, a scrolled pediment with applied plaques, and a desk interior in the Newport manner, but it also had unusual foliate carving below the shell on the prospect door (see Fig. 1a). We were intrigued, but the collectors had to catch a plane so we could only take a quick look. That was time enough for Dennis to note, "Look at the strange V-shaped markings on the tops of the [small interior desk] drawer sides. We've seen these before" (see Fig. 3). One of the collectors suggested that we might have seen the markings on a related desk-and-bookcase with paneled and shell-carved doors at Bernard and S. Dean Levy in New York City; and we recalled, indeed, that while in the gallery on a separate mission we had seen the desk-and-bookcase and observed in passing the strange V-shaped markings on the edges of the drawer sides. Taking our leave of the collectors, we were invited to return to examine the desk-and-bookcase, which we promised to do.

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Before our return visit, however, I went to New York City to examine the desk-and-bookcase there more carefully (Figs. 4 and 4a). Frank Levy reminded me that it had been found in Seekonk, Massachusetts, just over the Rhode Island border east of Providence, before being sold to an antiques dealer, the late John Walton, in the early 1980s. Handing me an interior desk drawer, he said that it had writing on it, but that he had not been able to decipher it. A bright light revealed a partially legible graphite scrawl on the inside of the drawer bottom, the surface of which was abraded by use (see Fig. 5.). Many pieces of furniture bear such tantalizing clues, but most remain frustratingly indecipherable. Here, however, I could make ...