This unusual chest both conforms to and defies conventions of painted furniture made in Maine during the nineteenth century. The form may be unique, as the top portion is a detached, independently constructed blanket chest that simply rests on the chest of drawers. Accentuating the form is surprising and masterfully executed painted decoration. Burling, graining, and webbing in areas of dense and dramatic patterning alternate with delicate strokes. The effect is fantastic and highly abstract, yet is also imitative and gives the impression of petrified wood. Despite its radical departure from typical painted surfaces, the chest still conforms in impulse to more traditional painted furniture made in Maine during this period, in its palette of earth tones with black patterning on a rusty red ground and imitative wood graining.

Studies of painted Maine furniture have demonstrated a general trend after 1800 toward imitating formal furniture by simulating wood or burl graining, dispelling the long-held notion that painted furniture was exclusively the taste of the middle class. Inventories of upper- and middle-class homes show both formal and paint-decorated furniture and further indicate that both types, especially chairs, were sometimes found in the same room. Major pieces of paint-decorated furniture, to which category this unusual chest would certainly belong, were generally confined to the private quarters of a house, where the occupants could be less formal yet still have color and quality in their furnishings.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Blanket Chest on Chest of Drawers," in American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 326.