Pair Card Tables with Lyre Supports, about 1815–17
Attributed to Thomas Seymour (1771–1848), Boston
Rosewood (secondary woods: basswood, mahogany, maple, and white pine), with ebony, brass line inlay, gilt-brass and bronze toe caps, castors, and mounts
Each, 30 3/4 in. high, 36 in. wide, 17 3/4 in. deep; open: 36 x 35 1/2 in.
Thomas Seymour was the finest cabinetmaker working in Boston in the first years of the nineteenth century. Despite the extraordinary quality of his work—indeed, perhaps because of it—he was, for financial reasons, unable to continue to operate his shop after 1817. In the years 1817 to 1819 he worked as foreman for the little-known James Barker, and subsequently served in the same capacity for the firm of Isaac Vose & Son from 1819 to 1825. Thus, it is difficult to be precise about exactly when and under whose auspices various pieces ascribed to Seymour were made. Like his New York counterparts, Duncan Phyfe and Charles-Honoré Lannuier, Seymour rarely duplicated himself, and as a result he developed a considerable repertory of designs, even within a single form. This pair of card tables is part of a group of card tables, work tables, and cellarettes in rosewood and mahogany that all display extremely fine brass inlay and various other decorative devices that showed Seymour’s foray into what Seymour scholar Robert Mussey has called “another new London style, termed ‘classical’ by scholars today…” (The Furniture Masterworks of John & Thomas Seymour, exhib. cat. [Salem, Massachusetts: Peabody Essex Museum, 2003], p. 359). Mussey went on to elaborate, in a discussion on related card tables at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that “this pair and a small group of related tables [with closed or open lyres] appear to share especially refined designs and specific details of construction, veneer, and ornament with other works by Seymour and are probably attributable to him” (ibid).
