VERY RARE WILLIAM AND MARY PAINT-DECORATED PINE CHEST WITH DRAWER, MILFORD, CONNECTICUT, CIRCA 1730

John S. Walton, Griswold, Connecticut;

Vogel Collection no. 316.

The floral paint decoration on this chest is based on the motif of a three-petaled flower using a template. This is one of nine known board chests with closely related decoration. Five of these chest are located at the following: the Colonel Ashley House, Ashley Falls, Massachusetts; Connecticut Historical Society; Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 34.128); Darien Historical Society, Bates-Scofield House, Darien, Connecticut; Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association; while the remaining three are in private collections (see John T. Kirk, Connecticut Furniture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967), p. 31, no. 50, Frances Gruber Safford, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Early Colonial Period: the Seventeenth-Century and William and Mary Styles, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 247-9, no. 103, Sara Emerson Rolleston, Historic Houses and Interiors in Southern Connecticut, (New York: Hastings House Pub., 1976), p. 127, Dean A. Fales, Jr., The Furniture of Historic Deerfield, (New York: Dutton, 1976), no. 382), (see John T. Kirk, Connecticut Furniture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967), p. 31, no. 49, John Walton advertisement, Maine Antique Digest, May 1984, p. 39D, Sotheby’s, New York, The Bertram K Little and Nina Fletcher Little Collection, January 29, 1994, sale 6526, lot 291). The Connecticut Historical Society chest is the only one to have an early history that states it descended in the Neddleton family of Milford, Connecticut.