Massachusetts Miniature Card Table, ca. 1790
GUEST:
It came from my grandparents, and they got it in around 1911. It's supposed to be from the governor of Vermont, when their first child was born. We don't know why, but...
APPRAISER:
Somehow it's connected.
GUEST:
That's right. So then it went from there to my mom's house, who has it right now. And that's basically what we know about it.
APPRAISER:
It's a really rare miniature card table. I asked all my colleagues on the floor, and not one of them has seen a miniature card table.
GUEST:
Oh!
APPRAISER:
A normal card table is 36 inches wide. This one's 28. And half of the 36 deep, which would be 18. This one's 14.
GUEST:
Oh!
APPRAISER:
This skirt is shrunk proportionately. The legs are shrunk half an inch in size. So it is a perfect miniature. They didn't take a big table and lop off the end of it to make it smaller. And it's made as perfectly as a full-size card table. How you tell a perfect miniature is if I took a picture of that and it stood alone, you couldn't tell whether it was full size or miniature.
GUEST:
Huh.
APPRAISER:
It's from Massachusetts.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
And it's about 1790 in period.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
And it's Hepplewhite in style. But some of the beautiful things about it are... you always look at a card table to make sure that the top matches. And you can see this is the same piece of wood, and it's beautiful mahogany. I mean, this is not second grade. This is the first grade island mahogany that they made it out of. And I want to pick it up and set it right up here.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Because it does have some significant repairs. This is a not-so-old repair, and it must have started to get loose here, and they decided to put this piece of wood on there. And then these are new glue blocks, as you can easily see. Beautiful, beautiful color underneath. You always look to see that the top color matches the side color. We'll just set it down so you can look at it again. And it's a typical D shape. It has wonderful inlay in here. It's got some other condition problems. It's missing a little bit of its banding, but nothing serious. And it has not been refinished. It has its old original finish. I am so glad you didn't touch it. I would say in a retail situation, it would be worth $8,000 to $12,000.
GUEST:
Oh, great!
Appraisal Details
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