Featured Connecticut Blanket Chest

Kinda slow in furniture section so thought i would try out my new cell phone cam (samsung galaxy), pretty good cam, i am impressed! This painted blanket chest was owned by George Dudley Seymour 1859-1945, a New Haven lawyer and active in all things Connecticut, his furniture collection was donated to the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS) in the 1940s.
C. 1690-1720 tulip poplar W&M blanket chest with original snipe hinges & brass pulls. When the CHS catalogued this chest they list it as Guilford origin but i think it was more likely built in the Hadley Mass area. Thankfully, George isn't around to hear my bad news!

 

Yes, I remember this one from "another" site. It's a beauty!

 

Thanks! but i now argue, it's not a connecticut chest. I took this chest to a museum conservator to get his opinion on it and after i gave him the seymour/connecticut connection, he advised no, he didn't think so. He got a copy out of Dean Fales book "American Painted Furniture 1660-1880" and BAM, i realized he was right. At the turn of the 17th-18th century, the carving of pilgrim days was replaced by paint as the main decoration of furniture. In Conn, it is mostly flowers, vines and the like but in Mass, particularly hadley, it was "gloriously naive geometric painting", almost a dart board type decoration. A famous example is the SW chest below
I am not unhappy about it, just sayin it ain't a conn chest!

 

Connecticut blanket chests in the same era have a much more floral paint decoration, like this

 

They are beautiful but my favourite is the last example! Thanks for sharing these I've never seen one is person, one day maybe!

 

Glad you liked! Paint was a very big deal back in the day when america left the rather boxy, chunky furniture of the pilgrim era built by joiners & decorated with carving and entered the totally new world of furniture built by cabinetmakers and decorated with paint. The world record for a single painted piece of american furniture goes to, Robert Crosman, a drum maker in Taunton Ma. This 1729 chest went for just shy of 3 million at auction about 10 years ago.

 

Omg, I am in love

 

LOL, i hear you Estates! Me too! Let's see now, there's you, me and about 5 other people in the world that like this kind of furniture, most everyone else, not so much.
I see you are in Virginia, it has an early paint story to tell as well. In the 18th century, about 50 Pennsylvania german/dutch/swiss families immigrated down the "old wagon trail" from PA. to the Shenandoah valley in Virginia. Among them was
Johannes Spitler, who built blanket chests decorated with paint. He used all the traditional PA german decorating themes, tulips, hearts, birds, etc but put them together in a very unusual way, almost a modern art type way, a few of his chests below.

 

I have to admit that I am among the majority in this...............while I can (and do) appreciate the craftsmanship, intellect, and talent that went into crafting pieces such as this, and their resultant beauty, I have a hard time "living" with this type of furniture. We had a fair to middling amount of true colonial furniture in our house (or more precisely, in our attics and barns) when I was growing up and much of it was painted. But the exuberance of colour and florid designs never appealed to me personally. When we donated the house to a historical society most of the pre-revolutionary furniture and papers/documents stayed with the house. The original house was built on a 1600s land grant, though it was greatly expanded over the centuries. It is sort of an irony that the historical society is restoring the house to its appearance circa 1941, but reflecting its long history.

 

"there's you, me and about 5 other people in the world that like this kind of furniture, most everyone else, not so much."

Don't undersell yourself! I know very little about this era of furniture, but I love seeing it and hearing the stories.

 

LOL, yeah, well you know, a slight exaggeration! Still, old furniture in general isn't exactly in fashion these days.
I can see why people back in the day went for the painted look and bright vivid color. It was a new thing & they were probably sick to death of pilgrim style furniture after 3 or 4 centuries. Plus they lived in the dark and having furniture that had some POP color wise was most likely very appealing.

 

The houses had bitty windows, when they had them at all, and some of them were filled with fabric and the like instead of glass. Glass was ruinously expensive at the time. It looks gaudy now, but back then it wasn't. It's not my taste either, but I can appreciate it.

 

what an amazing piece! Is the decoration still all original?

 

Me too!

 

these are lovely!

 

The Crosman chest? Yes, it is, ditto brass pulls. It is the only Crosman chest that is signed & it serves as a kind of Rosetta stone for the other 20 something crosman chests that are not.
Obviously, i was just kidding about only 5 people liking this type of furniture, the fact that this crosman chest sold for 3 million bucks is proof that demand is very high for outstanding examples.

 

This Crosman chest below was on the market aprox 5 years ago, it once belonged to Esther Stevens Fraser, the first furniture scholar to identify & study his work. In 1933 she published "The Tantalizing Chests of Taunton" and BAM! thus began the interest in Crosman's work.
This chest is an early example by Crosman, perhaps as a teenager as the design is not nearly as fully developed as the chest above and has a very child like quality. It has several condition issues, replaced lid, lock and the entire chest was painted green in the 19th century and later removed. It was hammered down for aprox 20k to a dealer who flipped it the next day to a client for 40K.

 

I'd think, with the prices they fetch at auctions, a lot of people like them.

 

LOL, yeah well, it was a joke AJ! i wasn't really serious! But, as we have seen in this thread, some folks are just not into early painted furniture. Indeed, in the first post i did on this forum, my hello post, gregsglass preferred my bird chest over the one in the Brooklyn Museum. Both chests were built in Boston, both were built in the same shop and about the same time. They are pretty much exactly the same chests of drawers except for one detail, one still has it's paint (brooklyn) and mine does not yet greg picked mine over the brooklyn chest! Greg lost a BOAT LOAD of money with his pick!

 

I like both, but I prefer the bird chest.