Lot Essay
With its scalloped-skirt and distinctive finials, this high chest relates to furniture made in Hartford County, Connecticut during the late eighteenth century. The overall design and stance is akin to those ascribed to the 'Willard' group of Wethersfield by scholars Thomas P. Kugelman, Alice K. Kugelman and Robert Lionetti, yet its variant skirt suggests that while its maker may have trained in Wethersfield, he practiced his craft further afield. The idiosyncratic design of the finials is seen on a desk-and-bookcase believed to have been made in Middletown by the same scholars. Like the Middletown desk and in contrast to the Willard group, the high chest offered here has an unembellished central plinth (Thomas P. Kugelman, Alice K. Kugelman and Robert Lionetti, Connecticut Valley Furniture: Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800 (Hartford, 2005), pp. 85, 129, cats. 34A, 55).