Connecticut Valley Furniture: Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800

CONCORD, MASS.

:Search Thomas P. and Alice K. Kugelman's varied library and you will likely find well-thumbed copies of The Work of Many Hands: Card Tables in Federal Americaby Benjamin Hewitt and, less predictably, Famous Crimes Revisited by forensic scientists Henry Lee and Jerry Labriola.

The bookend studies served as templates, substantially modified with use, for the exhaustive "Hartford Case Furniture Survey" that the Kugelmans initiated 14 years ago. Five hundred pieces of furniture and 8,000 photographs later, the Kugelmans, with the help of collaborator Robert Lionetti, a Jewett City, Conn., conservator, and the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, their sponsor, have brought the project to fruition. "Connecticut Valley Furniture: Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800" is on view through June 5 at the Concord Museum. It reopens at the Connecticut Historical Society Museum on June 23, where it remains through October 30.

The exhibition of 23 pieces of furniture lent by Yale University Art Gallery, Winterthur Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Historic Deerfield and a handful of private collectors is accompanied by an extensive catalog that is itself the work of many hands. In addition to nearly 200 entries, it contains essays by Alice Kugelman, Susan P. Schoelwer, Robert F. Trent, Dawn Hutchins Bobryk and Philip D. Zimmerman.

Having explored the best-known work in public and private collections of East Windsor, Conn., cabinetmaker Eliphalet Chapin (1741-1807) and his second cousin, Hartford cabinetmaker Aaron Chapin (1753-1838), the Kugelmans turned to auctions, those mysterious "conveyor belts," as they put it, of the marketplace that giveth new furniture discoveries as quickly as they spirit them away.