1. Published by the Albany Institute of History and Art and the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, respectively.
2. Esther Singleton, Furniture of Our Forefathers (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900-1901), see especially pp. 234—311. The 1809 or first edition of Irving's History may be found in Washington Irving, Dietrich Knickerbocker's A History of New York, ed. Stanley Williams and Tremavne McDowell (New York: Harcourt Brace, & CO., 1927). Wallace Nutting, Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (Boston: Marshall Jones CO., 1921), p. 270.
3. See David S. Cohen, "How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?," New York History 62, no. 1 (January 1981): 43—60; and Thomas L. Purvis, "The National Origins of New Yorkers in 1790," New York History 67, no. 2 (April 1986) : 133—53. For a succinct analysis of the ethnic component of Leisler's Rebellion, see Thomas J. Archdeacon, New York City, 1664—1710: Conquest and Change (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 97—146.
4. See Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8, no.1(1969) : 45; J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (ICY.: Atheneum, 1971); and Nancy S. Struever, "Historiography and Linguistics," in George G. Iggers and Harold T. Parker, eds., International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 127—50.
5. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1954), pp. 29—35. T. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, "The Dutch and Their Homes in the Seventeenth Century," in Ian M. G. Quimby, ed., Arts of the Anglo-American Community in the Seventeenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), pp. 14—21.
6. See Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1966), 2: 80—81, and 1: 210, note 2; see also E. B. O'Callaghan, Kenneth Scott, and Kenneth Stryker-Rodda, New York Manuscripts Dutch: The Register of Salomon Lachaire Notary Public of New Amsterdam, 1661—1662 (Baltimore: The Genealogical Publishing Company, 1978), pp. xii, xvi; and I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498—1909 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922), 4: 305. Baird argues incorrectly on the basis of his family's coat of arms that Le Chevalier originated in Normandy. I have discovered direct archival evidence that strongly suggests a Saintongeais origin. See Neil D. Kamil,"War, Natural Philosophy, and the Metaphysical Foundations of Artisanal Thought in American Mid-Atlantic Colony: La Rochelle, New York City, and the Southwestern Huguenot Paradigm, 1517—1730" (Ph.D., dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1988), PP. 563—68.
7. The sides are attached to the back with blind dovetails on Winterthur's Flushing dressing table. In recent years, an early (ca. 1695) stretcher-based table with one drawer was deaccessioned from Colonial Williamsburg (accession number 1930—17) and has resurfaced in a private collection. This table arguably originated in Flushing-or even New York City (due to the presence of cedrela and other exotic woods)-and it also shares a similar dovetailing technique with the Metropolitan's desk-on-frame. The remarkable thinness of its drawer linings would seem to indicate a closer affinity to the wood starvation mentality usually associated with seventeenth-century English and especially London craftsmanship, than with what we currently know of continental construction techniques.
8. See Simon Schama, Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (N.Y.: Knopf, 1987). |