A 1677 valuables cabinet made in Salem, Massachusetts, where history’s most notorious witch trials cost at least19 lives, will be auctioned later this month.
The newly discovered piece is the work of the Symonds shop of Salem, founded by a Norfolk, UK-born furniture maker John Symonds. It was probably made by one of his two sons.
It will be sold at the Important Americana sale at Sotheby’s, New York on January 23, where it is listed with an on-request estimate, suggesting a very high price is expected.
Although the Symonds shop is a fine, historically significant producer of early American colonies furniture, this piece is distinguished by its link to the bloody witch trials that are synonymous with the town of Salem.
From February 1692 to May 1693 the town was gripped by what most modern historians believe was an outbreak of mass hysteria that may have had psychological or even physical causes.
The trials ended after the executions of 19 people (14 women) and the deaths of at least six more during imprisonment and torture.
A 19th-century imagining of the Salem Witch Trials, which sparked a spiral of suspicion, accusation and denouncements that became a popular model for mass paranoia and political persecution.
Sotheby’s say that this piece is linked directly to the trials through its earliest owners.
It was made for Symon Horne and his wife Rebeckah Rea Stevens. Symon died in 1687 and Rebeckah married Joseph Ballard in 1692.
Ballard had lost his first wife, Elizabeth Phelps, in the year he married Rebeckah. She died after suffering a mysterious illness that Ballard charged to the supernatural influence of two local women, Mary Lacey Sr. and Mary Lacey Jr. her daughter.
They were convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death, but spared after confessing to “enchantment”.
The cabinet remained in the Ballard family, with one short break, from its purchase – possibly to mark the birth of a child – until its sale.
Sotheby’s say: “Very rarely do objects appear on the marketplace that are of such profound importance to the study of American material culture and a witness to American history. Upon reflection of such a rarity, one cannot help but realize that “we are simply passing through history. This … This is history.”
Most Symonds shop furniture is in institutional collections, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The pieces are of extremely high quality, luxury items of their time, and are considered an important marker of the transfer of British styles to the new settlements in America.
Relics of the Witch Trials are also extremely rare. In 2017, a deposition from the trials was sold for $137,500 at auction, and a psalm book that was owned by both a trial judge and the family of John Proctor, among the most famous victims of the trials, made $221,000 in 2016.
The close connection to the still-controversial episode in American history is sure to add value to an important, distinguished example of early American furniture.
