Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1795-1805
Yellow pine
Catalog no. 106
Most carpenter-made furniture from the Eastern Shore was executed in yellow pine, which was readily available and often painted to conceal the coarse grain of the wood. The blue-and-white paint on this chest, the most frequently used color combination on Eastern Shore furniture, is largely original.
The form of the front panels was probably taken from plates in William Salmon’s Palladio Londinensis (1755), a popular architectural design manual (see illustration). The doors on several contemporary Eastern Shore houses feature almost identical paneling.