High chest of drawers,

ca. 1760

The term "highboy," like its cognate "lowboy," is derived from a corruption of the French word "bois," or wood. Both types of furniture were produced in substantial numbers in America beginning about 1730, often in matched sets. Highboys, whose multiple drawers are divided into upper and lower sections, developed in late-seventeenth-­century England from the simpler chest of drawers on a stand. Early American varieties in the William and Mary style feature flat tops and four or more turned legs on ball or bun feet, joined together by horizontal stretchers. Later versions, like this especially well-preserved and finely proportioned example from Philadelphia, rest on curved cabriole legs, often with the claw-and-ball feet typical of the prevailing Chippendale style, which reached its apogee during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The finials and scroll-top pediment on this highboy create an upward visual thrust that, in combination with the graduated drawer sizes and rising design of the carved decoration and original brasses, lends an appealing air of lightness to the imposing furniture form. This example and its mate — a lowboy whose design, proportions, and carving exactly match, in appropriately diminished scale, those of the highboy’s lower section — are rare paired survivals of an unidentified, but clearly highly skilled, cabinetmaker. Both descended in the family of Andrew Kirkpatrick, Class of 1775, a lawyer, judge, and longtime Princeton trustee.