Bureau with Attached Mirror

Bureau with Attached Mirror, Boston, circa 1830.

The coved rectangular dressing mirror frame suspended from flanking carved scrolled brackets on two short drawers with flanking colonettes set back on a knee-hole or pedestal-end case with four drawers in each pedestal-end with an arched central drawer, resting on a molded base.

H 66¾”, W 57½”, D 21½”

Condition: Excellent: Minor veneer patches to base, re-finished in shellac in the manner of the period.

This dressing table is of superior quality and is a masterpiece of the form. Only Isaac Vose, Jr. and the firm of Emmons & Archibald, the finest cabinetmakers in Boston, are known to have made furniture of this quality in Boston in this period. The form itself, a pedestal end-dressing bureau, is exceedingly rare if not unique in American Classical furniture.

A related George IV pedestal-end dressing bureau with attached mirror or “toilet table”, shown in Ackermann’s Repository of Art, (series III, vol. 11, pl. 20) published in London in April 1828, or Thomas King’s Pl. 22, “Wash and Dress Stands” in the Supplementary Plates of The Modern Style of Cabinet Work Exemplified (London, 1829), are the probable inspiration for this example.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art published in their Bulletin an extensive essay on the dressing table; “Vanities: Art of the Dressing Table”, Fall 2013, seen here.