Cabinetmaker extraordinaire

HARTFORD, CT (PNAN) – Scheduled to close Sunday, October 22, 2023 at the Wadsworth Museum of Art is an exhibition of Thomas Day (1801-1861) works that highlights an 1855 wooden bureau made by Day featuring his hallmark undulating curves and fashionable Grecian style motifs.

Thomas Day, American, 1801–1861, Bureau, c. 1855, Mahogany, mahogany veneer, yellow pine, poplar, marble, mirror (replaced), 70½ x 42 x 18 in., Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. W. R. Clark and the Richard H. Jenrette Decorative Arts Purchase Fund, 1998.9. This bureau further highlights North Carolina’s own renowned furniture industry, dating to the late 1800s, while also exploring social and cultural realities and restrictions of the antebellum south.

Day was a master craftsman and free man of color working in North Carolina in the decades prior to the Civil War. By 1850, his cabinetmaking workshop in Milton, located near the Virginia border, was the largest in the state.  He earned a reputation as the premier cabinetmaker in North Carolina by customizing each piece of furniture to suit his client’s taste; no two pieces were alike.

The Bureau was one of 47 pieces of furniture, potentially the largest order of his career, made for David Settle Reid, a US senator. Day fulfilled this enormous request due to his newly mechanized workshop, making him an industrial pioneer in the Piedmont region.

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