GUEST: This belonged to my mother-in-law. It might have been her mother's before that, but I'm not sure. She was downsizing, and this didn't fit into the apartment she was moving into, and so she gave it to me.
APPRAISER: Do you have any idea what you have?
GUEST: Well, I looked online a little bit. It looked like it might be from New England, Federal period. I saw similar ones to it, and that's all I know.
APPRAISER: Well, I'll tell you, you have brought in a Federal period card table. They would have called it a gaming table. The family that had this might have had a pair-- they came in pairs. It looks like it's made around 1800.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: But then, on a scale of one to ten, you have one, which the tables were just plain fronts. You have two, three, four with some inlay. And then you have eight, nine, ten with really amazing veneering, turning, that kind of make that difference between an average piece and a great piece. This tapered foot is probably the narrowest that I've seen. It's so tiny. It comes down to a little, wonderful turning, swells up in this kind of like a balloon shape. It's actually two turned rings, and then the legs are reeded, and they actually swell, and then you have a turning just above that. And then one little detail that's so wonderful is the fact that this banding
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: there goes across the front goes around the leg. Then the upper part of this outset pilaster, this leg turning, is kind of spool turned. And then you have banding on the edge of rosewood against the mahogany. And on the front, you have this serpentine, wonderful curve, which is followed by the line at the top.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And these flanking, flame birch panels. So this is birchwood from New Hampshire, probably. The centerpiece is flame birch. It's really figured, highly figured. It is as good as you can get for flame birch. Around the flame is this wonderful light and dark stringing, contrasting inlay. So you have these two panels: the oval with flame birch, the rosewood around that, and then the mahogany. And it opens up, of course, with this back leg swinging out to a place to put candlesticks, play cards. You see this? These actually are matched, bookmatched, okay? Now, let's close it back up. I'm going to show you something, though. I'm going to have to tip it this way. That crackle?
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: That wasn't crackle back about 80 years ago or 60, when that was fixed. It would have been a painted-on surface to cover up a repair.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: So what they did is, look, I looked at this just the morning, I was looking at it, and they actually brushed on to cover up that patch of wood.
GUEST: Yep.
APPRAISER: See this muddy kind of wood?
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: That's all brushed over the original wood, as well as the replaced wood.
GUEST: To hide it?
APPRAISER: To hide it, yeah. But if anybody were to look quickly, they'd say, "Oh, the top's replaced," but it's not. It just looks replaced because they were trying to match it up.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Bottom line is, it's a Federal card table, it's very high quality, it does have that patch, but because it can be explained and the wood matches, you know it's okay. The market for Federal card tables has gone down. This table is a Federal North Shore card table, possibly Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which would help. I don't know, but it's really high end. With this repair, with the market the way it is, an auction estimate on this today would be $2,000 to $2,500, in that range. Ten to 15 years ago, this would have been $8,000 to $12,000.
GUEST: Okay. You know what, I love the table either way, and now I know a lot more about it.
