Secured from the Devouring Flames

1735-1745

Eastern white pine, red oak, red maple

A gold and dark brown landscape of birds, Chinese architecture, bridges, human figures, large fantastical animals, and an abundance of flowering plants plays across the drawer surfaces on the façade of this Boston high chest. The decoration is known as “japanning” and was done in imitation of Asian lacquer furniture. The craftsperson, or japanner first decorated the surface with vermillion streaked with lampblack to imitate the appearance of tortoiseshell. The craftsperson then created raised figures with gesso and coated them with gold and black paint.

The japan work is thought to be that of Robert Davis, an English-born japanner who worked in Boston until his death in 1739.

Josiah Quincy (1710-1784), a wealthy merchant originally owned the piece. It was rescued from house fires, not once, but twice, before 1770. In 1769, after the second fire, Quincy wrote in his account book "the greatest part of my furniture [was] by the timely assistance of our friends and neighbors, secured from the devouring flames."

Decades later, Josiah's great-granddaughter, family historian Eliza Susan Quincy, wrote the story of this high chest's survival on a small paper label which she pasted inside a drawer. Today the chest is valued not only for its rare japanning decoration, but for its well-documented history. It is on display at the Quincy House in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Silk brocade shoes

1770, London

Jonathan Hose and Son, maker

In eighteenth-century Boston, Massachusetts, the latest London fashions were readily available to those who could afford them. These brocade shoes were made in the section of London called Cheapside, known for its textile merchants and shoemakers. Like most shoes of the period, they have no right or left but were made to be interchangeable. The long tabs were intended to be fastened by buckles, which were worn like jewelry and could be transferred from one pair of shoes to another. Buckles could be set with diamonds for the wealthiest wearers, or, like these, made of paste. The original owner of these buckles, Prudence Jenkins, wore them at her wedding in 1778.

“…Adieu, New-England's smiling meads,
   Adieu, th' flow'ry plain:
I leave thine op'ning charms, O spring,
   And tempt the roaring main..” –Phillis Wheatley, “Farewell to America”

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was the first Black, the first enslaved person, and only the second woman in America to publish a book. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was first published in London in 1773. It was published twice more in England before the end of the century, and in seven editions in America. It brought its author great fame and her freedom.

Through her poetry, Wheatley addressed the terrible wrong imposed on her fellow Africans by their enslavement. This copy belonged to Abigail Quincy (1745-1798) who inscribed her name in it in 1774. It was found in Historic New England’s Quincy House, Quincy, Massachusetts.

Urban Landscape

Photograph of the China Trade Gate, colloquially known as the Chinatown Gate, in Boston, Massachusetts.

This photograph was taken in 2017 by John D. Woolf as part of a series intended to highlight threats to Chinatown from gentrification and development. Signed by John D. Woolf on verso.

John Woolf (b. 1952) has worked as a photographic artist for more than forty years. His photographs of Boston’s Chinatown and diners in the Northeast are part of his effort to document the transformation of the American urban architectural landscape and the fast disappearing twentieth-century roadside architecture of the Northeast industrial corridor. Woolf’s photographs document the Chinatown many are hoping to preserve.

The gateway, proposed by noted Boston entrepreneur and longtime community activist “Uncle” Frank Chin, was commissioned by the China Trade Center, designed by architect David Judelson, and gifted from the Taiwanese government to the Chinese community of Boston in 1982. Made of painted steel tubing on a concrete base, the paifang, also known as pailou, archway at the Beach Street entrance to Chinatown was installed in 1988 and rededicated in 1990.