This table has no known counterpart, writing tables being almost unheard of in eighteenth-century American furniture. However, it bears a number of features indicative of a Philadelphia origin: its secondary woods, its local family history, its Marlborough legs, and the origins of its design. The table combines details from a number of plates in the third edition of Thomas Chippendale's Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director (1762, 1982.1133). Physical evidence indicates that, at the back, there was once an upper part, just as appears in some of the engraved sources.

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