: 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.
