Connecticut Valley Furniture by Eliphalet Chapin And His Contemporaries, 1750-1800:

I chose to purchase this book for several reasons. I grew up in Connecticut with a lifelong interest in working with wood. When my grandchildren were born, they slept in rock maple cribs I had designed and built. Only after I had discovered my love for working with wood did I learn that I had ancestors who had worked with wood. The clincher for me to purchase this book is the fact that I am descended from some of the people featured in this book.

I was as good as a brand new book, without a mark on the dust cover. I talked to people who purchzsed and paid humdreds of dollars more.

Fabulous book! Eliphalet Chapin is an ancestor and this book is very useful in understanding the family at that timem as well as the beautiful furniture they created.

This beautiful book is both a labor of love and an important scholarly achievement. In it, Thomas and Alice Kugelman, with Robert Lionetti, have established a framework for the study of furniture built in the Connecticut River valley, from Stonington north to Springfield and Northampton, Massachusetts, during the flourishing of design and craftsmanship in the second half of the eighteenth century. By limiting their examples to casework, pieces with drawers intended at least partly for storage, the Kugelmans and Lionetti, combining documentary evidence with a system of direct observation, have identified several previously unknown makers and their workshops; they have located the origins of unattributed pieces, and they have suggested threads of connection to furniture makers in other colonies. Their scrutiny takes into account elements of ornament and construction; moreover the authors pay close attention to the particularities of each piece and resist the impulse to categorize. They celebrate anomalies, finding in them, ultimately, a key to the beauty of the objects that emerged in this astonishing half century of American domestic artistry. These desks and chests, plain and fancy, remain tangible evidence of the evolution of a new vocabulary to express a new culture--a vocabulary influenced by the urban high styles of Philadelphia, Newport, and Boston, but distinct from them, too, and more suited to the simpler, if not less sophisticated, circumstances of life in these smaller river towns. The Kugelmans bring into focus the richness of invention that existed throughout colonial New England; they discuss this furniture as tangible expressions of an individulity and sense of possibility that came to define a new nation. Connecticut Valley Furniture tells, eloquently, a story that is an important adjunct to the political and economic history of the times.

Beautifully illustrated and composed. A must for the dealer/collector turned on to rare and expensive early American furniture with a regional flavor. Handicapped in a traditional way unlikely to be noticed: unchallenging scholarship that barely passes muster, to bring respectability to a costly, whimsical business.