Whitehorne House

Watercolor painting depicting John Goddard's house in the Easton's Point neighborhood of Newport, RI. The composition includes two houses and dock scene with beach. Written in pencil script, bottom right corner: Old Newport houses, 1865. In bottom left corner, in pencil: S.C.

The Whitehorne House Museum’s oval dining table is one of only two known labeled dining tables made by John Townsend. This dining table is an example of the type of architectural furnishings considered to be necessary in 18th-century dining spaces. This graceful neo-classical oval table retains the functionality of its predecessors as it can separate into a table and two consoles for alternate uses or storage. The plinths above each leg are decorated with four undulating vertical blocks or “book inlay,” a feature associated with the workshop of John Townsend. On the legs is a string of five bellflowers centering a spine of black inlay, and, characteristic of John Townsend’s work, the bellflowers rest above two inlaid dots. Pasted on the center of one of the back rails of one of the consoles is a rectangular engraved label reading MADE BY / JOHN TOWNSEND, / NEWPORT. with the date 1796 written by hand.

This armchair is one of a group of three that demonstrates a strong Dutch influence on some of the earliest furniture made in Newport, RI. It also speaks to connections, perhaps less well known, with local Native American craft production. Unique to the Whitehorne example is the braided cornhusk seat, possibly woven by local Wampanoag or Narragansett weavers. This is an unusual feature found in other early chairs associated with Little Compton, which remained a fairly isolated agricultural outpost into the twentieth century but had early ties through families such as the Browns, who owned this chair, to nearby Aquidneck Island and the urban centers of Portsmouth and Newport, as well as to local Native American craftsmen.
The red paint with gold decoration dates to the Victorian period; it covers a layer of blue paint, date unknown, but also not likely original.

This is one of a pair of ball and claw foot side chairs in the Whitehorne House Museum collection, originally part of a larger set. They have served as the touchstone of what a typical Chippendale chair by John Townsend might look like. The overall effect of these chairs is one of strength. The base is particularly robust, with its boldly carved ball and claw feet and thick unchamfered rear legs joined soundly by block and ring turned stretchers; a standard feature of eighteenth-century Massachusetts and Rhode Island chairs. The arched section at the center of the crest rail is crosshatched, a favorite decorative device of Newport craftsmen. During the second half of the eighteenth century, chairs with interlaced c-scroll splats were popular with cabinetmakers along the east coast. The splats on this pair of side chairs are based on English printed prototypes, as was a common practice in each of the major colonial port cities.