COURT CUPBOARD

As early as 1668, John Rickards (working 1665-1688) of Accomack County, Virginia, described as a carpenter, agreed to produce for Mrs. Anne Boote an amazing variety of furniture forms “to bee done by me, John Rickards” that included four chests, eight bedsteads, nine tables, five clothes cupboards, five court cupboards, and “one Courth Cupboard very handsome according to Mrs. Boote her directions.” Although Mrs. Boote commissioned five court cupboards from John Rickards, today, only two southern-made court cupboards survive, and MESDA is extremely fortunate to own one of them.

While the artisan who made MESDA’s court cupboard remains illusive, its provenance in the Vines-Collier-Hicks family of York and Brunswick counties in Virginia is intact. The court cupboard passed through the female line from daughter to daughter and is perhaps the “old cupboard” listed in the 1737 inventory of Thomas Vines of York County. Used for the storage and display of expensive ceramics, textiles and silver, it presents a function usually assigned to women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Its frame-and-panel construction is typical of seventeenth-century-style joinery, but the unidentified craftsman exercised his own particular flair in wood choices: the rails and stiles are made of white oak; the panels and shelves are yellow pine; and the balusters, half spindles, and bosses are turned from native-grown walnut with a dark stain applied to imitate the appearance of exotic, imported ebony. After more than three centuries of existence, the cupboard amazingly retains it original wrought iron hinges.