Card Table

This early card table has no known history prior to its discovery in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1931, but its structure and design tie it firmly to several other examples with southeastern Virginia associations. The three earliest include a pair of tables that descended in the Eyre family at the lower tip of the Eastern Shore, forty-five miles east of Williamsburg. A nearly identical example was first owned by the Semple family of New Kent County, northwest of the capital.

Despite outward differences between the legs and knee blocks of the Eyre and Semple tables and those of the CWF example, these four card tables appear to be the work of a single shop. All feature textile-lined tops with projecting squared corners, square reserves for candlesticks, and oval pockets for game counters. Each has deep rails with vertically laminated blocked ends and straight lower edges and an opening for a small drawer behind the swing hinge rail, although only one of the drawers survives. Perhaps most unifying of all is the unusual design of the swing leg. When closed, the top of the movable leg on each table drops behind a thin (five-sixteenths-inch) projection of the left side rail.

A fifth table, known only through a circa 1900 photograph of the John Tayloe House in Williamsburg, is almost certainly from the same shop (CWF archives). Although without the square and oval depressions, its top displays the same overall shape as the other four tables, and its blocked and laminated rails follow their lead as well. The table's cabriole legs, deeply voluted knee blocks, and carved ball-and-claw feet are virtually identical to those on the CWF table. Coarsely carved C-scrolls and acanthus foliage on the knees of both tables also compare well.