Chest
Possibly William Searle
Thomas Dennis American
The richest and most vigorous early colonial carving is that associated with the work of William Searle (1634–1667) and Thomas Dennis (1638–1706) of Ipswich. Paired leaves, with a naturalistic, three-dimensional quality rare in American furniture of the period, dominate the panels of this chest; the panels are carved in the popular seventeenth-century design of a stalk of flowers and leaves emerging from an urn, of which only the opening is indicated here. Searle and Dennis came from Devonshire, England, where a tradition of florid carving, using many of the motifs seen on this chest, flourished in the early seventeenth century.
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