Acknowledgments
For their assistance with this article, the author thanks Cecilia Bermudez, Elaine Bradson, Andrew Brunk, Giovanni Bucchi, Ruth Claxton, Peter Fodera, John Hays, Claire Kenny, W. David Knox II, Jeanne Ko, Esther Morales, Kenneth Needleman, Dr. Victor Pina, Dr. Leyda Quintana, Isabel Rueda Rodriguez, Yelene Rodriguez, Jeff Rosenheim, Suzanne Rubin Schein, Olaf Unsoeld, Cornelius Van Horne, Dr. José Viera, Julio Viera, Carlos J. Zerquera, and Rafael Zerquera.

1. Mrs. Avery Jarvis, Blomingdale, New York City, to Samuel F. B. Morse, March 14, 1813, as quoted in E. McSherry Fowble, “Without a Blush: The Movement toward Acceptance of the Nude as an Art Form in America, 1800–1825,” Winterthur Portfolio 9 (1974): 121. Fowble mistakenly cited Morse as the author of the letter. For the accurate reference, see Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and His Journals, edited by Edward Lind Morse, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914), 1: 101. Charles Percier, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, Recueil de decorations intérieures comprenant tout ce qui a rapport à l’ameublement, comme vases. . . . (Paris, 1812). Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1807). George Smith, A Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1808).

2. The author thanks Walter Richard Wheeler for calling his attention to Andrea Black’s Living in Cuba (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), which illustrates the dolphin card table illustrated in fig. 10 (p. 114) and one of the winged caryatid card tables at the Museo Romántico (p. 128).

3. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), pp. 119, 140.

4. David Turnbull, Travels in the West, Cuba with Notices of Porto Rico, and the Slave Trade (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1840), p. 146.

5. Thomas, Cuba, p. 83. Christie’s, Important American Furniture, Silver, Prints, Folk Art and Decorative Arts, New York, January 19, 2001, lot 123.

6. Thomas, Cuba, p. 141. Justo G. Cantero, Los Ingenios (Havana, 1857). For Cantero’s mansion, see Edwin F. Atkins, Sixty Years in Cuba (Cambridge, Mass.: privately printed at Riverside Press, 1926) p. 68; and Samuel Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil (Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Publishing Company, 1871), p. 419, as cited in Thomas, Cuba, p. 147 n. 46.

7. For assistance with this article, the author is extremely grateful to Carlos J. Zerquera y Fernandez de Lara, Official Historian of the Town of Trinidad whom the former interviewed on February 29, March 1, and March 2, 2004. Zerquera is the person most responsible for the restoration and furnishing of the Palacio Brunet. He personally acquired a pair of winged caryatid tables directly from a Trinidad family for use in the Palacio Brunet and kindly shared their history. He also provided information on American furniture in private and public collections in Cuba. The author is also indebted to Dr. José Raúl Viera Linares and his wife, Cecilia Bermúdez, who were incomparable translators and guides to Cuban life and culture, both past and present. Dr. Victor Pina Tabío offered invaluable assistance by providing contacts and introductions in Trinidad.

8. Zerquera interviews. A local newspaper titled La Corbeta Vigiliancia was established in Trinidad in 1820. Shortly afterward, the name was changed to El Correo de Trinidad. Careful reading of this paper might reveal the source and range of imported goods in Trinidad. Customs records for other port towns including Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Cienfuegos could also be checked for evidence of American furniture imports. Turnbull, Travels in the West, p. 354, used customs records to report on illicit (according to English law) landings of slaves in 1839 at ten different ports including Trinidad and such lesser-known towns as Guanimos, Mariel, Camarioca, Santa Cruz, and Puente de Guano. In some instances these sites may have been nothing more than smugglers’ coves. The fact that the Spanish colonial government recorded the importation of these slaves holds out the promise of rewards for future researchers in Cuban archives.

9. Peter M. Kenny, Frances F. Bretter, and Ulrich Leben, Honoré Lannuier, Cabinetmaker from Paris: The Life and Work of a French Ébéniste in Federal New York (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), pp. 98, 101 nn. 114, 115, app. 9 (Lannuier’s estate inventory), 3 and 5 (Brinkerhoff and Bayard invoices). For details on the Bulloch commission, which may have included suites of parlor and dining room furniture, see Frances F. Bretter, “Lannuier’s Clients in America: A Taste for French Style,” in ibid., chap. 3, pp. 135–37.

10. For an assessment of Lannuier’s marketing methods, see Kenny, Bretter, and Leben, Honoré Lannuier, pp. 56–63.

11. For the Van Rensselaer, Campbell, and Bosley suites, see ibid., pp. 104–20 and 133–35. Descendants of the Sánchez y Iznaga family of Trinidad sold their house and its contents, including the lyre-base card tables, one dolphin card table, and its matching encoignures to the Cuban government. This furniture was deposited at the Museo de Artes Decorativas in Santa Clara in the mid-1970s (Zerquera interviews). The mate to the dolphin card table is illustrated in fig. 11.

12. The pair of card tables with the winged caryatids were acquired with a history of ownership in the Pomares family of Trinidad (Zerquera interviews). Accession records at the Museo de Artes Decorativas indicate that the dolphin card table and pair of encoignures belonged to “Sánchez Iznaga” of Trinidad. It is uncertain precisely to whom this refers. It may be José María Sánchez y Iznaga of Trinidad, a member of Club de Havana, the center for what became known as the Cuban anexionismo. During the 1840s the annexationists sought alignment with the U.S. in fighting British enforcement of abolition, which threatened the livelihood of the Cuban planters (Thomas, Cuba, pp. 207–9). It could also be Saturnino Sánchez Iznaga, who was appointed mayor of Trinidad by occupying U.S. military forces who “temporarily” took over Cuba in 1899 at the end of the Spanish-American War (Thomas, Cuba, pp. 420–22). The author thanks Adrian Quesada, curator at the Museo de Artes Decorativas, for sharing catalogue information. Béquer’s house was sold in the early twentieth century, torn down above the first floor, and gutted. Many architectural components were sold off as quality building materials. Given this history, it may be that some of Béquer’s furniture was sold before the house was demolished and could have come into the possession of other local families, including Sánchez y Iznaga and Pomares (Zerquera interviews).

13. Handwritten manuscript, Smyth Collection, (Ph i) 114 A, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Zerquera interviews. The author thanks Señor Zerquera for alerting him to the existence of the Smyth Collection, which contains more than 1,000 items including numerous letters from Juan Béquer/Baker to his sister, Catherine Comegys, mostly from the 1840s and 1850s. Only one letter from 1816 survives. Unfortunately, Baker’s writing is very difficult to decipher. All of the letters were reviewed by the author, but none revealed any requests for furniture, fabrics, or other items from Philadelphia, nor did they shed any light on whether he hired a Philadelphia architect or builder to design his house in Trinidad. Béquer’s naturalization as a Spanish citizen is recorded in the Historical Archive of Trinidad, Actes Capitulares, 1814–1820. Cited in the archives of Carlos Zerquera, “Béquer” file. The Smyth Papers (Ph i) 114 A contains letters between lawyers in Philadelphia and Havana pertinent to the family of Catherine Comegys’s claim on her brother’s estate. Their claim supposedly hinged on an earlier will, which the courts in Havana rejected.

14. Zerquera believes Béquer’s house was completed about 1825 and that the design came from Philadelphia. Zerquera remembers seeing ten or twelve memoria arquitectónica (as-built plans of the house) together with the notes and drawings of the architect but no longer knows the location of these documents (Zerquera interviews).

15. Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil, pp. 410, 412. Thomas, Cuba, p. 148 n. 52, cites Atkins, Sixty Years in Cuba, p. 124, as the source for the story of Béquer’s extravagant mosaic floor.

16. Zerquera provided the description of the entrance hall and information on the later installation of the cast-iron stairs in the cathedral. He also showed the author a faded photocopy of what appeared to be an early-to mid-nineteenth-century engraving of an elevation of the Béquer mansion facing the Plaza Serrano. Zerquera was unable to recall the source of the photocopy. Zerquera interviews. Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil, p. 267.

17. Percier and Fontaine, Recueil, pls. 6, 17, no. 4. For more on Lannuier’s mature antique style of ca. 1815–1819 and the three other lyre-and-swan card tables from his shop, see Kenny, Bretter, and Leben, Honoré Lannuier, pp. 81–97, nos. 85–87. Other New York card tables with lyre and swan supports are known. All have rounded front corners, a feature associated with work from the 1820s, and lyres that rake forward at varying angles, a feature at odds with the Lannuier examples, which are perpendicular and form a right angle at the plinth. For a lyre-and-swan card table by another New York maker that bears a spurious Lannuier mark, see Christie’s, The Collection of Ronald S. Kane, Important American Classical Furniture and Decorative Arts, New York, January 22, 1994, lot 364. Another example incorrectly attributed to Lannuier was advertised by F. J. Carey III, in the catalogue for the 1994 Winter Antiques Show in New York.

18. For Deming and Bulkley, see Maurie D. McInniss and Robert A. Leath, “Beautiful Specimens, Elegant Patterns: New York Patterns for the Charleston Market, 1810–1840,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 137–74.

19. For the dolphin furniture made in memory of Nelson, see ibid., p. 161; and Nancy McClelland, Duncan Phyfe and the English Regency, 1795–1830 (New York: William R. Scott, 1939), p. 26, pl. 17. It has been pointed out that the so-called dolphins on this furniture have more in common with the dolphin-fish or mahi-mahi. For purposes of this article such a distinction will not be made, and even when the animals have elongated bodies and scales they will be called dolphins.

20. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols, translated by John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 303. Pierre Grimal, Dictionnaire de la mythologique grecque et romaine, 3rd corrected ed. (Paris, 1963), as cited in ibid., p. 304.

21. Iréne Aghion, Claire Barbillon, and François Lissarrague, Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity, translated by Leonard M. Amico (New York: Flammarion, 1996), pp. 230–31. Perseus was banished from Argos and set off on his adventures after an oracle predicted to Acrisius that he would have a grandson who would kill him. After returning to Argos with his bride Andromeda, the hero threw a discus during athletic games that mortally wounded his grandfather, thus fulfilling the oracle’s prediction. The author thanks Claire Kenny for sharing her research on the ketos and its symbolic role in Greek art.

22. Deming and Bulkley advertised furniture for sale in Charleston in January 1818 (McInnis and Leath, “Beautiful Specimens,” p. 172 n. 31). The same year New York cabinetmaker John Everitt advertised “Grecian and Plain Dolphin Sofas” in Charleston (Charleston Courier, December 28, 1818). The author thanks Maurie D. McInnis for this reference.

23. Fodera Fine Art Conservation, Ltd., Treatment Report for Swivel-Top Card Table by Charle-Honoré Lannuier, ID# 1695, submitted to the Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The author thanks Peter Fodera, Ken Needleman, Ruth Claxton, Olaf Unsoeld, Cornelius Van Horne, and Giovanni Bucchi for generously sharing their observations and analyses of the dolphin card table illustrated in figs. 1 and 7. Peter Kenny, conversation with Adrián Quesada, Curator, Museo de Artes Decorativas, Santa Clara, Cuba, March 3, 2004.

24. For the winged caryatid card tables with canted corners and heavy lion’s-paw feet, see Kenny, Bretter, and Leben, Honoré Lannuier, nos. 66, 67, 68, 69, 80, 81, and 82.

25. Ibid., pp. 186–87.

26. Thomas Sheraton, Cabinet Dictionary, 2 vols. (1803; reprinted, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 1: 62–63.