Family documents suggest that in the breakfast room the Eustises used a table that was older than their early nineteenth-century European furnishings. It is represented by this mahogany tea table, North Shore of Massachusetts, 1780-1790, given to the Shirley-Eustis House Association by Mrs. Charles F. Hovey. The Chinese export porcelain tea service, 1800-1830, is one of several surviving tea services that belonged to the Eustises. It was given to the Association by Daniel Denny.
Silver
punch strainers made in London. Top right: Marked by Samuel Wight Welles
(free 1739), 1758/9. Length 10 1/2 inches. Bottom right: Marked with and
unidentifiable maker's mark obliterated by piercing, 1754/5. Length 8 inches.
Left top: Marked by Edward Aldridge I (w. 1724-c. 1740. Length 9 inches.
Left Bottom: Marked by Paul Crespin 91694-1770), c. 1740. Length 9 1/4 inches.
Platter and mazarine, Chinese export porcelain, 1780-1790. Diameter 17 3/4 inches. Photograph by Mark Sexton.
In
the dining room is a French mahogany and mahogany-veneered pier table with
gilt-bronze mounts and a red marble top, 1790-1810. On it is a gilded and
bronze porcelain centerpiece, also French, 1800-1820. The pier glass belonged
to the Eustises.
On the secrétaire à abattant in the breakfast room is a French mantel clock, probably Paris, c. 1790, made of brass, marble, and gilt bronze, which retains its original glass bell. An important document of the French taste in Federal New England, it passed from the Haven family of Portsmouth to the Cheever family of Saugus, Massachusetts, in 1793, when Mary Haven married Charles Augustus Cheever.
