by Leigh Keno
When I bumped into Morgan at Christie's East, he had been involved in the antiques business for about five years. As we chatted about the market, I mentioned that I had a prospective client, someone I had just met, who was actively looking for great Newport furniture, particularly pieces by the Goddards and Townsends. Would he let me know if he came across anything special? I asked. Morgan grinned. “You'd better be free for lunch, Leigh,” he said, “because I've got a story for you.”
Within ten minutes, Morgan and I had settled into a table at a Small Irish pub just a hundred yards up the block from Christie's East, and over a beer and a burger, Morgan began to tell me an incredible tale. Nearly ten years earlier, when Morgan was still with the phone company, he explained, the village of East Hampton had been hit by a two-day-long snowfall, which cut off phone service to hundreds of residents. It was a busy time for Morgan and his crew, who had to work double shifts in order to patch the downed cables in the area. Like many of the towns on Long Island's East End, East Hampton is a quiet, somewhat isolated place for three seasons a year, with a full-time population of middle-class families, some with roots that date back to the seventeenth century. In summer, the town swells dramatically with moneyed summer home owners and renters.
I'd visited East Hampton on several occasions in the summer to stay with friends. A few years earlier, when I was still at Doyle's, Bill Doyle and his wife, Kathy, used to invite me out to the house they owned on Lily Pond Lane, a few driveways down from where Steven Spielberg now summers in his Charles Gwathmey-designed home. Bill and Kathy were members of the Maidstone, an old-guard beach club on the ocean with a golf course and grass tennis courts. As was typical of Bill's savvy sense of humor, he used to give his daughters and their friends dark green T-shirts printed with the William Doyle Galleries logo to wear to the beach. He figured it was good advertising to have all these fresh-faced young kids running around the Maidstone in Doyle T-shirts.
That snowy day, Morgan was just a few miles and many worlds away from the Maidstone, working with his crew in front of one of East Hampton's more modest homes. The two-story clapboard, now restored, sat to the right of the traffic light just before eastbound travelers on the Montauk Highway reach East Hampton's picturesque village green. “I was finishing up patching a cable under the lawn when this frail-looking old man came out of the house,” Morgan told me. “He must have been about eighty, and even though it was less than twenty degrees out, he came shuffling through the snow in a bathrobe and slippers.”
The man asked Morgan if he could check the phones in his house. “I tried to explain that I had just fixed the wire,” Morgan said, “but the old guy was so insistent, I told him I'd be in just as soon as I put my tools in the truck.”
The man waited for Morgan on the porch and then brought him into the house through the back door, which opened directly into the kitchen. With lingering amazement, Morgan described the bizarre landscape that greeted him: “The kitchen was stacked floor to ceiling on both sides with used aluminum TV-dinner trays. The old guy had left a small passage, maybe two feet wide, just big enough to walk through, and that was it.”
A diamond in the rough.
Morgan made his way through this strange scene to the kitchen phone, which, no surprise to him, worked fine. The man insisted that Morgan check the bedroom extension—what if he needed to call for help in the middle of the night? He led Morgan through a room that was probably the house's original dining room, so neglected now, Morgan said, “that there were tumbleweed-size dustballs covering the floor.”
The room was dark, save for one low table lamp, and as Morgan instinctively turned his head toward that light, he suddenly saw something that made him stop dead. “I couldn't believe it,” he said, his face flushed with the memory, his big hands, callused from years of outdoor work, cutting excitedly through the air. “I saw a tea table and a bonnet-top highboy on cabriole legs. They were both definitely Newport pieces, Goddard and Townsend school. And once the old fellow led me out to the center hallway, I saw a drop-leaf dining table near the front door. No question—it was Newport, too.” Curling the fingers of his right hand around an imaginary ball, Morgan continued. “All the furniture had claw-and-ball feet, but the feet on the tea table had open talons.”
I looked at Morgan hard over my hamburger platter. This sounded too good to be true. As much as I respected his eye, I initially suspected Morgan had seen Colonial Revival copies, dating to the beginning of the twentieth century. He said the room was quite dark, and under such circumstances, he probably hadn't gotten a close-enough look. But Morgan can be pretty convincing when he wants to be, and the more he insisted that what he had seen was real, the more I wanted to believe him.
To begin with, a rectangular tea table with cabriole legs is one of the most desirableforms in American furniture (it literally looks like a tray that has been set in a low stand). These tables are small and so elegantly shaped that they look as good in the middle of a room as they do against the wall. Specifically designed for tea drinking, the tables are wonderfully evocative of eighteenth-century custom and culture; you can easily imagine America's preeminent colonialists taking tea together, musing over the king's latest injustices to his increasingly short-tempered subjects. Today, collectors who are lucky enough to find a good example of such a table often place an eighteenth-century silver or porcelain tea service on its top.
Much of a rectangular tea table's character comes from the spring of its cabriole legs, which curve outward from the tabletop at each of the four corners before descending in a tapering reverse curve. Unlike the horizontally aligned versions seen on the round Philadelphia tilt-top tea table that I had bought from Eddy Nicholson, which sprang out from beneath the fluted support pillar, the cabriole legs of the table that Morgan described ran almost the entire height of the form. That meant they were much more attenuated and slender in appearance. But Morgan had described not simply a tea table but a Newport tea table with open-talon claw-and-ball feet, which are incredibly sculptural and compelling and tend to look like the feet of a large bird of prey. There are perhaps twelve eighteenth-century Newport examples of this form with claw-and-ball feet known in the world, fewer than six of which carry these most desirable open talons. To hear of one sitting undiscovered in a run-down house on East Hampton's main road—well, that was just incredible. I took a long swig, savoring the thought more than the beer.
To my further amazement, Morgan had also mentioned a Newport bonnet-top high chest in the house (often referred to as a highboy), a form that Americana collectors consider a true prize. American high chests of the 1760s and 1770s typically consist of a chest of drawers raised on a four-legged (usually cabriole) base that is also fitted with drawers. Although Morgan claimed to have spotted this one in a dining room, such chests were usually used in bedchambers to store linens and clothing, and they were often designed en suite with a low dressing table that resembled the base of the high chest in design.
I have often thought, that eighteenth-century baroque and rococo furniture is the most collected American furniture and fetches the most money, because it was so clearly designed with the human form in mind. High chests are roughly the same height as the average person, and it is no coincidence that today we use words such as legs, knees, and feet to describe their various parts. The brass drawer pulls and escutcheons (the metal shields surrounding the keyholes) march up the facade of a chest like shiny buttons on a double-breasted jacket. In short, the proportions, the S curves of the sizable cabriole legs, the nooks and crannies of the carved detail—all appeal to us as if we are looking at another human being. The record price for a piece of Federal furniture, with its more restrictive, rectilinear designs, is a fraction of what major Queen Anne and Chippendale furniture has brought. I think that disparity arises because Federal pieces lack the curves, the anthropomorphic movement, and, quite frankly, the sex appeal of their earlier counterparts.
Original openwork brasses on the Tillinghast high che
st.
The high chest Morgan had described had plenty of alluring curves, from its upswept bonnet top (which looks like a bell with a yawning break in the middle) to its racy cabriole legs. And like the tea table he had first mentioned, undiscovered full-blown high chests just don't turn up. As for the dining table spotted in the front hallway—well, that was like nuts on a hot-fudge sundae: two of the most desired, collectible forms around, and a bonus prize, too. The story alone was enough to ensure that I would be paying for lunch.
Obviously, if Morgan was right, he had found a virtual treasure trove of furniture made in Newport during the peak of its artistic prominence—the 1760s and 1770s. He had also attributed the pieces with a fair degree of confidence to the Goddards and Townsends, the town's most prominent craftsmen. That made the find an even greater coup. Indeed, the most expensive piece of American furniture ever sold at auction was a block-front secretary-bookcase (possibly made by John Goddard) for Nicholas Brown of Providence. That piece sold at Christie's for $12.1 million in 1989 to Israel Sack, Inc., buying on behalf of a private billionaire client. In fact, the Nicholas Brown secretary had sold just months before Morgan and I met, and the excitement of that sale further flavored our lunch as Morgan continued his story.
Before he left the East Hampton cottage, Morgan found out that the elderly manwas a longtime tenant; the furniture, in fact, belonged to his landlady, Caroline Tillinghast, who lived in a house at the end of the driveway, set farther back from the road. A few days later, Morgan returned to the property and knocked on her door to see if she was interested in selling any of the pieces. Mrs. Tillinghast, whom Morgan guessed to be in her early eighties, listened carefully as Morgan explained his interest in the furniture. She knew it had value—a local appraiser a few years back had valued the group at about $25,000—but she owed it to her tenant to provide him with a fully furnished house. She wasn't interested in selling. What's more, she told him, the furniture had been in her husband's family for some time, and when he died, he had willed it to her son Frank. In truth, it wasn't hers to sell.
My hands shook with excitement as I snapped this image of the chest's skirt shell.
Morgan knew Frank Tillinghast. He ran a prosperous deli in town, called the Chicken House, where Morgan frequently bought his lunch. So the next day, Morgan made a point of driving through the snow to buy his sandwich at the Chicken House. When he explained that he thought Frank owned some furniture of significant value, the deli owner, a man of few words, betrayed not the slightest expression of joy or amazement. “I might as well have been talking about the weather,” Morgan said. “I figured he was asking himself, Now what does this guy know about antiques? He's a telephone repairman! I wasn't a dealer or a specialist. I had no credentials.”
Frank sent Morgan back to his mother. Even if the furniture was technically his, any decisions about the pieces were really his mother's to make. Besides, his mother had a rental house that she needed to furnish. By the time Morgan ran into me at Christie's East, nearly ten years had passed since he had first seen the furniture, and neither Frank nor his mother were any closer to making a decision about the fate of their extraordinary heirlooms. Despite Morgan's occasional queries, Frank remained resolutely noncommittal.
Now I was completely hooked. My burger lay half-eaten and cold in front of me. I was far too excited to eat. What had started as another day scouting Christie's East in search of sleepers had turned into a potentially tremendous discovery sitting roughly a hundred miles away in a small East Hampton home. I wanted to see that furniture. “Morgan, you've got to talk to Frank Tillinghast one more time,” I said.
Morgan smiled and agreed to try. This time, he hoped, maybe the presence of a New York antiques dealer with a profound interest in Newport furniture would alter the dynamic. And since I knew Morgan to be a man of his word, I felt confident that he wasn't going to approach another dealer with the same opportunity he'd given me. Before we separated after lunch, Morgan and I agreed that if a deal were ever made, we would split the profit equally, whether we bought the pieces outright or on a commission basis for a client. It was a standard agreement. Morgan found the pieces and I was going to place them—that is, if we could persuade Frank and his mother that the furniture was worth selling.
It couldn't have been more than a week or two after our lunch that I received a phone call from Morgan. He was pumped. Timing is everything in this business, and it seemed that by odd and sad coincidence, Mrs. Tillinghast's elderly tenant had died a few weeks earlier and the house was being cleaned out. She was going to let us in.
At this point, it was the start of summer, and as it turned out, Leslie and I, together with a few friends, had rented a house on Peconic Bay in Southampton, about fifteen miles west of East Hampton. The house was our antidote to dealing with antique American furniture all week long, because neither the house nor any of its contents was more than ten years old. We gave a lot of parties out there. One weekend, we hired a doorman and the deejay from Au Bar, a New York nightclub, and entertained some four or five hundred people. Freya, my girlfriend at the time, was a Californian who had come to New York to model. She was about five foot nine, with blond hair, blue eyes, and endless legs—really an American classic herself.
The Tillinghasts' East Hampton home.
Freya's legs were so long, in fact, that she had trouble fitting into the 1967 dark green MGB-GT coupe that I drove on my way to my Saturday-morning appointment with the Tillinghasts and Morgan in East Hampton. The car was a loaner from my dad, whose passion for vintage cars Leslie and I both inherited. Even on the straight, well-maintained roads of the Hamptons, it was still a pleasure to drive. With the windows down, I could hear the engine purr, and I would recall many a windy drive with Dad as we climbed the curving hills above our house in Mohawk. Nowadays, Leslie and I drive vintage race cars, including a 1958 Lotus Eleven, a 1959 Lola Mark 1, and a 1979 Ferrari 512 BB/LM Silhouette, at track meets around the country. One of the main reasons the sport appeals to us, beyond the rush of moving fast in a machine designed specifically for that purpose, is that we are re-creating, in a sense, the excitement of an earlier era in motor racing. Each car on the track is like a rolling piece of sculpture, as precious as any American tea table or chest of drawers.
Leslie and I love racing vintage cars, especially this 1938 SS-100 3.5 liter Jaguar.
It was nearly eleven o'clock by the time Freya and I pulled up in front of the Tillinghasts' small clapboard home, just as Morgan arrived in his truck. He had stopped at the deli to give a ride to Frank Tillinghast, whose mother was standing on the back porch, waiting for us. We all trooped into the house after her: First came Freya, then Morgan and Frank (a large, burly guy), who was still wearing his deli apron. I brought up the rear, excitement gathering in my chest. Right before I see a new object for the first time, I feel a palpable rush of anticipation that hovers between elation and disappointment. Will it or won't it be something really great? In this case, Morgan had already sent my hopes soaring.
The house was dark inside, but it had been well cleaned since Morgan's first visit. There wasn't an aluminum tray or dust ball in sight. Breathing in that damp old wood smell so common in houses near the water, we all made our way from the kitchen to the dining room with its faded pink-flowered wallpaper, white wainscoting, and ceilings so low I could touch them with my arm half-bent. By now, my eyes were adjusting to the gloom of the house and I began to register the furniture. Everything else—the people, the voices—just faded away.
Directly in front of me, between the white-curtained windows, was a bonnet-top chest of drawers with a graceful broken-arch pediment that centered around two hollowed circles. The chest was set in a low frame with four meager-looking cabriole legs. In front of the chest, placed somewhat haphazardly toward the center of the room, stood the small rectangular tea table that Morgan had described, and to the left, against the wall, was a large low table with drawers, atop which sat a television.
At thi
s point, I'm sure I must have started nodding my head, because that's something Leslie and I both do when we are excited about an object. And I was more than excited, but I was also trying to maintain an outward appearance of calm. Within seconds—if not instantaneously—I knew that the bonnet-top chest of drawers and the table with the television set belonged together. I don't mean they were designed to accompany each other; I mean that they were made as one piece—a two-part high chest of drawers that had at some point in its history been separated. Everything about the two pieces—the marvelous swirling wood grain that seemed to animate the facades, the matched proportions, the decorative hardware, and the quality of carving—pointed to their union. You see this sort of thing a lot at country auctions, when tops and bottoms have been separated for one reason or another. People slap a new top on the lower half and a set of legs on the upper half and create two new pieces.
