Work Table (1800–1825): Art, History and Details

Work Table (1800–1825) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Needlework typically occupied several hours of a well-to-do woman's day. Worktables are compact, lightweight, and therefore portable. Casters permitted one to move the table around a room and to reposition it easily for sewing or writing. The top drawer of this example was designed to hold writing equipment and contains a writing tablet that could be placed at a convenient slant. The second drawer is divided into compartments for sewing equipment. Needlework was stored in a bag below, accessible by pulling its frame out of one of the table's shorter sides. This simple, small table with its slender, tapered legs is decorated with painted landscapes almost certainly copied from engravings. From about 1800–1825 furniture decoration of this kind was taught in schools for proper young ladies of New England.

Object facts

• Title: Work Table
• Date: 1800–1825
• Culture: America, Massachusetts, Boston, 19th century
• Type: Furniture and woodwork
• Technique: maple, brass hardware
• Dimensions: Overall: 69.9 x 51.5 x 40 cm (27 1/2 x 20 1/4 x 15 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Furniture
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1981.75

Collection credit

Gift of Miss Elizabeth Bartol

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1981.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 2 (February 1982): 39–82.
• Hawley, Henry. “Four Pieces of American Furniture.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 10 (December 1982): 324–339.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.