This card table is a masterpiece in its brilliant design, masterful proportions, and exquisite carving. It is characterized by a serpentine façade with a carved front rail and large projecting front square corners, a playing surface with counters and candle rests, cabriole legs with leaf- and scroll-carved knees and claw feet, and the addition of a fifth leg that pivots outward to support the top when opened. The form is considered one of the masterpieces of American Rococo furniture design and multiple examples have been identified, representing several shop traditions.

Possessing a proportion, grace and delicacy seldom found on others of its type, this one is exemplary for its sophisticated curvilinear form overlaid with exceptional rococo carving. The maker's understanding of the rococo aesthetic is evident in the serpentine shaping of the skirt and dynamic execution of the cabriole legs, with their pronounced S-curve and bold claw feet. The carving is especially fine, particularly in the integration of the gadrooning into the skirt and the rich knee carving draping down the legs.

This table relates to a group of tables identified as Type II, or Beekman, card tables by Morrison Heckscher in "The New York Serpentine Card Table," Magazine Antiques, May 1973, pp. 974-83. Type II tables were named for a pair of tables owned by James W. Beekman (1732-1807), who may have purchased one from the New York cabinetmaker William Proctor on January 15, 1768. The tables were on long term loan to the New York Historical Society and sold in These Rooms, Important Americana, January 21-2, 2000, sale 7420, lot 718, for $910,000.

Tables of the Beekman type similarly display a shallow serpentine skirt, a delicate gadrooned molding below the front skirt, elegant foliate and C-scroll knee carving on the front legs, and claw feet with high balls and pointed claws. One of few tables most nearly identical to this lot is the Varick Family table in the collects ion of the U.S. Department of State, formerly in the collects ion of Israel Sack Inc. and identified as a “Masterpiece.”¹ Other related examples include a triple top table in the collects ion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and one with a history in the Van Vechten family that sold in These Rooms, Highly Important Americana from the Stanley Paul Sax collects ion, January 17, 1998, sale 7087, lot 467.² Another with related gadrooning, C-scroll- and flowerhead-carved brackets and claw feet descended in the Meserole-Hogglandt-Jagger family of New York.³ That table reflects a similar stance and proportions but lacks carving on the knees.

^1. Clement Conger and Alexandra Rollins, Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), pp. 102-3, no. 21, and Albert Sack, The New Fine Points of Furniture, (New York, Crown Publishers, Inc.,1993), p. 283.

^2. Morrison Heckscher, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, 1985), pp. 171-3, no. 103.

^3. Israel Sack Inc., American Antiques from Israel Sack collects ion, vol 6, (Washington, DC: Highland House Press), p. 1570, P4632.