Considering the Philadelphia Table

This is a mahogany slab table made in Philadelphia sometime around the 1760s to 70s. It is truly an icon and an artwork that most decorative arts scholars, especially furniture historians, will study very carefully. Largely because of its design, the degree of craftsmanship, and its connection with, you know, this very prominent Philadelphia family. It's part of this larger suite that came from the Catmulletter family in Philadelphia. John and Elizabeth were the power couple of 18th century Philadelphia. Obviously someone that had the means to commission this type of work and acquire a slab of marble was doing quite well in the time period. Often these types of tables would have been used in a service sense, so very much like a sideboard in terms of dining or entertaining. So large punch bowls or perhaps hot dishes would have been laid out on them. So when the table came to us in 1918, there were a number of spots that had actually broken off. In the front there were two sections where there were missing pieces. These sections have not been repaired, but we can tell that there is evidence of, you know, carved components where they attached. We're kind of curious about those and what we can learn about what it originally looked like and if it could be repaired or brought back to its original appearance. I am Marijn Manuels. I work as a furniture conservator in object conservation, focusing mostly on American furniture and interiors. It is a misconception that all we do is woodwork, and it's actually a very small part of what we do. It becomes more and more rare that we complete entire elements of any piece of furniture. Over the past several decades, I think the preference has mostly been to preserve the history, show the history, whether it's a worn finish or broken off element. This rail was actually a large block of wood that would have risen all the way up to here that then had to be carved back in order to create a very light design on the front. At this point in time, the designs become so extreme in their freedom and their free flowingness and their organic features that it really starts to stretch the abilities of the material itself. And that's where we come into these pierced elements. So this would have been one solid piece of wood, and then the carver needs to shape all these elements and then cut out this pierced section. And as he is working and removing material, it becomes weaker and weaker. So it takes some skill to create this without breaking it in the process. As almost all furniture, this is a piece to be used. So a lot of activity around it could have been the knee of a servant that knocked off the first scroll. Kids are around, the piece gets moved over time. Something like this element would have broken off quite quickly because this is a weak spot. And the fact that we actually have this as an original element is quite special. Once you really start looking at the piece, you find quite a number of losses that your eye doesn't catch at all. But the big question was, do we want to complete some of the decoration that would have been below the front rail? Because that's the focus of the piece. And in that sense, it's a little half complete at the moment. Then the question becomes, should we try to complete it in a responsible way? So our goal was to find out more about the little remnants, to understand exactly what happened there. We looked back at the prior treatments. This is a table that came to us in 1918, had a number of different elements that were missing. And in 1962, they recreated the sea scrolls on the side of the table, based on one that was intact. In my opinion, that's a justified repair. They decided not to address all of the losses, presumably for similar reasons that we are now looking at, because it becomes more difficult to justify your decisions once you don't have so much information on what would have been there, could have been there. The use of Photoshop has really become quite important over the past decade or decade and a half, because it gives conservators the possibility of virtually completing a lost element. And a very good way to do that is to isolate elements from the object itself, and then plant them in the image. But at that point, still, you need to decide, yes, we can do it, but should we do it? And in this case, we are pretty confident about the kind of ornament that would have been there originally, but we can never know for sure, and we decided not to. Well, you and I have lots of great ideas about this. It does seem a little bit like us putting our imprint on the piece itself, and maybe taking a step too far forward in terms of conservation, because conservation is not restoration in that respect. True. Yeah, it's a balance, in the sense that visually, this table is incomplete. We know this, and of course, we like to present our objects to the public the way they would have been made at the time. But as you say, the other side of the coin is we don't want to mislead the public either, and telling them this is what it looked like when we don't quite know. Merijn really did a wonderful job in terms of looking more at the visual vocabulary on the table, and trying to figure out a sequence that might work based on that. Even having that breadth of information, it still would be up to us to select and choose, and we felt that that was going too far, because then these would be elements that were recreated based on Merijn and Elise's opinions. That's why we're going to leave it now, but it doesn't mean that we won't treat it in the future. It means that for now, with the information we have, we don't feel it's justified to recreate these elements.