The Rivers Collection of Charleston Furniture at the Gibbes Museum of Art
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by Matthew A. Thurlow
Among the invitations to visit an array of superlative houses in Charleston during the course of the Fall 2024 Symposium, from mid-18th-century Drayton Hall to early-19th-century Chancognie House, participants were treated to a superb introduction to the Holy City’s architectural heritage.
Within this built environment, symposium lectures and tours placed imported goods against a nuanced context of local craft and consumerism. Notions of stylistic preferences echo throughout the city and were often driven by trends from afar. As Tom Savage highlighted during his rousing opening presentation, Charleston’s plantation and merchant classes were devoted anglophiles, and they imported furnishings from London and elsewhere in Britain in great profusion. And as guests encountered during their visit to the privately owned William C. Gatewood House, early-19th-century Charlestonians also turned to Northern port cities, especially New York, for the latest wares in the Classical taste. Beyond notions of design is the essential reality of the laborers working in the city’s workshops, which often included enslaved artisans, such as a mid-18th-century woodworker named York, whose story is highlighted in the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive.
Those seeking exemplary 18th- and 19th-century decorative arts from Charleston were able to count the city’s bastion of fine art, the Gibbes Museum, as an essential stop thanks to the recent gift of selections from the Rivers Collection. Much like when the National Gallery of Art received the Kaufman Collection in 2010, the Gibbes’s acquisition of furniture and silver from the Rivers Collection in 2023 ensures that three-dimensional art will have a permanent place among the museum’s renowned collection of painting and sculpture (figure 1). Assembled by local businessman John M. Rivers, Jr., the collection first arrived as a loan in 2016 and was installed amidst the Museum’s spellbinding holdings of portraiture from the Colonial and Early National periods.
Rivers’s ancestors arrived in South Carolina in 1670, and he was eager to assemble significant examples wrought by the city’s talented craftspeople. He recognized that Charleston-made decorative arts were captivating the eye of collectors outside of the Lowcountry. In addition to acquisitions through auction houses and dealers, Gibbes Executive Director Angela Mack mentioned that Rivers also found a stunning Neoclassical linen press abandoned on the side of the road. The 44 examples of furniture and silver that he gifted to the Gibbes represent only twenty percent of his collection. For the furniture scholar, many of the key pieces were included in Brad Rauschenberg and John Bivins’s 2003 magnum opus The Furniture of Charleston, 1680–1820.
In the Colonial period, Charleston’s tables and cabinetwork tended toward the neat and plain taste, with notable exceptions. For example, a kettle stand from 1750–60 (figure 2) features a beautifully carved tilt top. A rare variant of the more common tea table, the Rococo influences on Charleston’s mid-18th-century artisans can be seen in the C-scroll and acanthus leaf carving found on the cabriole legs as well as the scalloped top. According to Rauschenberg and Bivins, the stand is among the earliest pedestal tables made in Charleston, and the combination of carved legs with pad feet is uncommon among American examples of this form.1 The bold carving is indicative of a local trend in architectural woodwork, including the contributions of Henry Burnett at St. Michael’s, to whom participants were introduced during a visit to the church with Ralph Harvard.
The American Revolution concluded after an extended British occupation of Charleston, and the city took years to regain its financial and mercantile footing. A new cohort of cabinetmakers rose to the forefront of the trade, which included a noteworthy Germanic community. Jacob Sass, who arrived in Charleston in 1773, was among the most prominent of these artisans, and a majestic piece of Neoclassical case furniture in the Rivers Collection is attributed to him. A hybrid form that combines a secretary base and linen press top (figure 3), the serpentine façade extends from the base to the pediment. According to Rauschenberg and Bivins, there are only two Charleston-made case pieces with this costly feature.2
Charleston’s cabinetmaking community also included prolific makers of Scottish descent, and the sideboard shown in figure 1 is indicative of that presence. Referred to as a stage top, immigrant furniture makers brought this feature from Edinburgh and Glasgow to the Lowcountry and embellished the façade with expressive crotch mahogany veneers, vibrant banding, and marquetry panels. The Prince of Wales feathers reinforce the British origins of this dining room form. This sideboard is part of a group of at least five related examples thought to be produced by a single shop.3
The Holy City has benefited from generations of dedicated preservationists who have collectively stewarded buildings and objects for our benefit, and we are fortunate Mr. Rivers ensured that Charleston’s material culture remains accessible through this impressive display at the Gibbes.
- Bivins, John and Bradley Rauschenberg. The Furniture of Charleston, 1680-1820 (Winston-Salem, NC: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 2003), p. 323.
- Ibid, p. 473.
- Ibid, p. 643.
Matthew A. Thurlow is the Executive Director of the Decorative Arts Trust.
A print version of this article was published in The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, one of our most popular member benefits. Join today!