Founding Fathers Writing Table

In 2009 I was contacted by an organization called Historic Woods of America. The director asked if I would be interested in participating in a project where makers were asked to build objects from wood that had been culled from historic sites in Virginia. The wood for this piece all came from plantations of Founding Fathers (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Patrick Henry), as well as one very special tree that was planted by George Washington himself in Fredericksburg near the home of his mother and sister.

There are fifteen different species used in the writing table. The background of the top is horse chestnut and is the tree planted by Washington in Fredericksburg (it was only cut down after it finally succumbed to old age in 2005). The primary wood of the structure is walnut from the Mount Vernon whiskey distillery. Other woods include tulip poplar, cherry, mulberry, boxwood, osage orange, ash, red oak, maple, white oak, cedar, pecan, elm, and sycamore.

I was interested in trompe l'oeil marquetry and therefore to make the illusion work I need to depict objects that are essentially flat. I chose a scene where it appears that a draft of the Declaration of Independence is being worked on. There is a sheet of paper, a quill pen, old-fashioned glasses, brass keys, and an envelope.

The difficult task was making the marquetry with only the historic woods. The temperate zone trees growing in Virginia have a limited tonal range. The lightest tone I had was ash and the darkest was to use the endgrain of walnut.