Corner cupboard from the Asa Curtiss House in Woodbury, Conn., circa 1780, 95 inches high by 53½ inches wide by 20¼ inches deep. Private collection.
:In 1969, two years after John T. Kirk's influential presentation "Connecticut Furniture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., the Litchfield Historical Society documented and displayed furniture made in Connecticut's northern and westernmost county.
The Litchfield Historical Society recently revisited the project, exploring the topic through a contemporary lens and applying the latest research techniques and interpretive methods. The result is a much expanded and more nuanced view of furniture making in the region before the Industrial Revolution.
Now something of a collector's item,
Litchfield County Furniture: 1730–1850
listed 49 cabinetmakers, Elijah Booth of Woodbury and Silas E. Cheney of Litchfield prominent among them. It also highlighted the distinctive diagonal braces that some Litchfield cabinetmakers used to reinforce the underside of the bases of case pieces.
While some of the original findings still stand, it was clear that the research was dated, said Catherine Keene Fields. The historical society's director sought funding from the Connecticut Humanities Council and elsewhere to implement the new study. The resulting exhibition, "To Please Any Taste: Litchfield County Furniture & Furniture Makers, 1780–1830," continues at the Litchfield Historical Society through November 30.
Litchfield antiques dealers Peter and Jeffrey Tillou underwrote the cost of the companion catalog,
To Please Any Taste: Litchfield County Furniture & Furniture Makers, 1780–1830
by Edward S. Cooke Jr, Ann Y. Smith and Derin Bray. This useful new reference identifies 700 Litchfield County joiners, a list compiled by Bray, who in a separate chapter writes in more detail about the country's best known craftsmen and their milieu. An essay by Smith, "Furniture Characteristics," convincingly relates design and construction details to specific makers and towns.
Chest of drawers, Sharon/Salisbury area, Conn., circa 1800, 35 inches high by 40 inches wide by 19 inches deep. Courtesy of the Salisbury Association, Salisbury, Conn.
Ingeniously, the volume comes with a searchable compact disc containing 200 of the pieces that Smith tracked down, photographed and documented to Litchfield County. The CD, which includes catalog information and closeup photos of construction details for each object, is a work in progress and will be updated from year to year.
"There was a time when anything from northwest Connecticut was thought to be from Woodbury," said Smith, who spent 25 years gathering material on the region's furniture. The former curator of the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn., requested that Edward Cooke, the Charles F. Montgomery professor of American decorative arts at Yale University and author of
Fiddlebacks and Crooked-backs: Elijah Booth and Other Joiners in Newtown and Woodbury 1750–1820
(Mattatuck Historical Society, 1982), guide the project.
A Winterthur graduate now with Northeast Auctions, Bray joined the team in 2007 as a researcher after working with Brock Jobe on the Southeastern Massachusetts Furniture Project. Bray made an exhaustive search of probate and court records and tax lists for references to Litchfield furniture and furniture makers, something that had never been done before.
