WINDSOR AREA, CONNECTICUT, 1660-1680

With its interlocking lunettes, leafy interiors and scrollwork surrounds, the carved ornament on this box is closely related to that seen on two joined chests both attributed to the Windsor area in the Connecticut River Valley and now at the Connecticut Historical Society. The first is ascribed by Joshua W. Lane and Donald P. White III to the "opposing gouge" group of Windsor and dated from 1660 to 1680. The same scholars attribute the second to the Barber shop tradition, possibly Thomas Barber, Sr. (1614-1662) or Thomas Barber, Jr. (1641-1711), of Windsor and Simsbury and date it to circa 1660. See Joshua W. Lane and Donald P. White III, The Woodworkers of Windsor: A Connecticut Community of Craftsmen and Their World, 1635-1715 (Deerfield, 2004), pp. 32, 40, cats. 11, 15.