Furniture

Sugar Chest with Added Inlay, ca. 1830

Appraisal: Sugar Chest with Added Inlay, ca. 1830

Transcript

GUEST: My husband and I bought it from a picker about two years ago. We just loved it, and we loved the inlay, we loved the look of it, the size, pretty much everything about it.

APPRAISER: Do you collect things like this?

GUEST: We do, especially Southern... Tennessee and Southern pieces.

APPRAISER: And when you bought it, what did they say about the piece?

GUEST: He just said he had got it from, I think, a house in North Carolina. He thought it was from Virginia. He didn't really know a lot. We took it outside and looked at it and checked it over.

APPRAISER: And liked what you saw.

GUEST: And liked what we saw.

APPRAISER: Was it expensive?

GUEST: For us, yes, for me, yes.

APPRAISER: Okay. Well, if you're a fan of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW, you've probably seen us appraise and look at sugar chests like this before. That's what this form is. And it's a uniquely Southern form. And because of that, it has long been prized and collected. And as a result, we see a fair amount of them. They tend to be anywhere from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina. So that's in keeping with what you were told. Typical of Kentucky and Tennessee examples of sugar chests, this is made of cherry, top to bottom, with the exception of a butternut bottom board, which is pretty unusual. You don't see a lot of butternut. It does turn up in some Kentucky examples. It's part of what makes me think it's from that part of the world. Inside there's a divider for the different kinds of sugar and that sort of thing. Because this is a popular form, the first thing you want to know is, is it real? A lot of the ones we see are not real. They have been turned into a sugar chest because that's a more saleable form.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: So you may have a table or something that a good cabinetmaker can sort of alter and turn into something. So I went over it carefully, and everything about it is in keeping with a period example. And these date typically to the 1820s, 1830s, in that area. You always like to see... on a top like this, you want it to be one board, maybe two. But if you see lots of narrow boards there, it often means it's a replacement. And that's a common ailment with these. Do you think it has its original finish?

GUEST: I would hope so, but would hardly dare.

APPRAISER: I would hope so, too. But in this case, I don't think so. And if you look inside, in this back corner you can see a couple of long, dark drips there. That's a big flag that says this has been refinished.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: The pegging on the piece, if you look at the pegs, are out of round, they're slightly square, they've never been out. So the piece has great integrity. Now, the inlay. The inlay is the big question here. The piece itself is a great example of a sugar chest of that period. The inlay is always a question. And here's the thing-- in the 1920s and '30s, a lot of these were getting inlay added to them, because they wanted them to be more spiffy.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: And we love that today, but it makes it tricky for us to look at these, because inlay, even if added, might be 100 years old.

GUEST: Uh-huh.

APPRAISER: You always hear us talk about, "Oh, original finish, original finish."

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: Part of the reason is it's hard to tell when a piece has been refinished whether that inlay started life there. In a piece like this, that makes a huge money difference. The only way to know for sure is to do microscopic finish analysis. But my assessment of this is it is probably not original.

GUEST: The inlay.

APPRAISER: It's a late form to have that kind of inlay. You typically would have tapered legs instead of round legs. And this particular design of inlay was one of the favorites of the people who are adding inlay to these. Tell me, what did you really pay for it?

GUEST: It was upper four figures.

APPRAISER: Upper four figures.

GUEST: Yes, it was.

APPRAISER: $8,000?

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: $8,000.

GUEST: Tiny bit higher than $8,000.

APPRAISER: Okay, as a sugar chest with no inlay, it has good integrity. Without the inlay at all, it's a $2,000 to $3,000 piece at auction. If the piece had its original inlay, even refinished, it's still a valuable object.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: I would think at auction, maybe $8,000 to $12,000. The perfect scenario, which is original inlay, original finish, I think you could expect $15,000 or $20,000 at auction. That's why they add the inlay. It adds value. If you went to market with this piece, I think people would be hesitant, because it's guilty until proven innocent.

GUEST: Okay.