Strapwork carvings from Thomas Dennis shop, 17th-century Ipswich, MA.
All of them. There's only 6.
[a long one - a lot of photos.]
One segment I have planned for the upcoming strapwork-carving video I’m working on is a look at the sources for these patterns. Today I’ll show the New England examples - there ain’t many. All from one shop, that of Thomas Dennis (c. 1638-1706) of Ipswich, Massachusetts. When we say “from the shop of...” - that’s a nod to the fact that we don’t know for certain he did all of these - some could be his work, some apprentice-work, etc. What we do know is these works are all related, they all came from one shop.
I’ll start with two wainscot chairs - both descended in Thomas Dennis’s family; the first one went to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. It’s the top rail (under the crest) that carries the pattern I’m focused on. A short section of this strapwork - so-called because the narrow, straight bands that connect different elements of the pattern - because of its size, there’s not much detail in this carving.
That rail is about 4 1/4” x 13” - true of both of these chairs, pretty close anyway. But even in that small space it has several of the hallmarks of these designs - arches, fleur-de-lis, abbreviated volutes at the ends of the arches. The scale and spacing makes these arches steep and narrow.
The other chair, also descended in the Thomas Dennis family, is at the Peabody Essex Museum (was donated to that museum’s forerunner in 1821).
You can see the relationship between the chairs - unmistakably from the same source. Top rail this time - sorry for the poor photo, it’s the only detail I have - you can compare and contrast with the Bowdoin chair.
Same scale. Same notion, short on details, but manages to tuck in the typical elements. Next - a chest at Winterthur - came from an Ipswich house in the early 1980s.
The top rail, now long enough to get more repeats - the detail photo is just less than half the pattern, the middle is another fleur-de-lis to our right.
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