Exhibition Guide

Taken from the still-extant Ringgold House on Water Street in Chestertown, Kent County, Maryland, this room was installed at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1932. At that time, early American interiors were regularly removed from their colonial sites to be added to American Wings in large public museums around the country. The original house, dating to about 1743, was purchased in 1767 by Thomas Ringgold (1715–1772), a prosperous lawyer and merchant who operated out of Chestertown, a flourishing pre-Revolutionary port on the Chesapeake Bay. The new owner then modified and improved the house, adding a wing at the back and embellishing the front parlor with elaborate woodwork.

The exquisite woodwork has recently been assigned to two talented London-trained Philadelphia carvers. The garlands over the mantel are thought to be by John Pollard. During the late 1760s and early 1770s, he was the principal carver in Benjamin Randolph’s shop on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Pollard’s work here includes sheaves of wheat, fruit, and flowers suspended from ribbons. The door surrounds, with their magnificent, deeply carved shells, are attributed to Hercules Courtenay, who arrived from London in 1765. Courtenay worked with Pollard as an indentured tradesman in Randolph’s shop until he opened his own enterprise in 1769, shortly before the Ringgold parlor was redecorated. In one of Randolph’s surviving account books under Ringgold’s name is a debit entry “To Shop £23:6:6d,” dated 5 August 1771. This could refer to a charge for carving the Ringgold House woodwork, which would then have been shipped overland or by water from Philadelphia to Chestertown.

Both carvers had worked previously under Thomas Johnson, a London carver famed for his Rococo designs. Johnson’s two former pupils certainly knew their teacher’s publication, A New Book of Ornaments (London, 1762). A tiny vignette at the top of the fireplace chimneybreast depicts several swans, a tree, and a little building derived from Johnson’s pattern book.

At present, the Chestertown Room is not completely restored. When the room came to the BMA, its doors were grained to resemble mahogany. However, the door nearest the fireplace was actually false, placed on the partition wall for architectural symmetry. That door has since been opened up. It was found to be much thinner than the door farthest from the fireplace, which had always been functional, as its oft-polished and now worn silver-plated door knobs and escutcheon plates attest. The square space above the mantle may have contained a “prospect”—an overmantel landscape painting that is now either destroyed or buried under layers of paint. The original color scheme of the room requires further research. The paint would surely have been oil-based, giving a rich, subtle sheen to the surfaces, which might or might not have been stony neutral tones. Over the door exiting the room at the left, you can see a deeply carved shell where many coats of paint have been removed. Eventually, all accumulated paint should be removed and the carving brought back to its original crisp character. The unusual bare mahogany chair rail is found in two other Chestertown rooms, one of which is now at the Winterthur Museum.