Case furniture of the Chapin school, 1775-1800

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2005 by Thomas P. Kugelman, Alice K. Kugelman

Eliphalet Chapin of East Windsor, Connecticut, has, since the 1920s, been the lower Connecticut River valley's best-known, and generally considered its most gifted, eighteenth-century cabinet-maker. Born in Somers (then in Massachusetts), Chapin was trained in the century-old local craft tradition based on the English guild system that evolved in the valley following its settlement in 1635. (1) He spent the years from 1767 to 1771 as a journeyman in an unidentified Philadelphia shop (or shops), where he assimilated that city's sophisticated rococo design and local construction techniques. Bringing them back to his native region, he successfully abstracted the Philadelphia models, creating a radically different style, smaller in scale and simpler in design, which he was able to market to his neighbors and patrons.

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The essentials of Chapin's life and career have been known since the 1930s. (2) He was a fifth generation descendant of Deacon Samuel Chapin (1598-1675), one of the founders of Springfield, Massachusetts. His grandfather Ebenezer Chapin (1677-1772) was an early settler of Enfield, Connecticut. Eliphalet's father, Ebenezer Jr. (1705-1751), died when his son was ten. His legal guardian was then his mother's brother Pelatiah Pease (1709-1769), a member of a long established family of woodworkers who presumably arranged Eliphalet's apprenticeship to an unidentified local master.

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Chapin probably completed his apprenticeship in 1762 at the age of twenty-one and was evidently working as a journeyman in East Windsor, when, in 1767, he was named in a paternity suit by Hannah Bartlett (1746-1813) of East Windsor. He denied his guilt, refused to marry Bartlett, and left for Philadelphia. During his absence, a judgment was rendered against him whereby some of the land he had inherited from his father was awarded to the plaintiff in lieu of child support. Chapin was back in East Windsor by 1771, where he purchased a small house lot on Main Street on which he built a brick dwelling and shop, and remained there until 1798. His name appears in the 1800 census in East Hartford, but he died in East Windsor seven years later, leaving two daughters but no male heirs.

Chapin's patrons throughout his career were almost exclusively his neighbors and their relatives in adjacent towns. These included members of the politically well connected Wolcott, Ellsworth, Loomis, Grant, and King families, who were prosperous farmers, merchants, shipbuilders, and tradesmen. A wedding often occasioned an order for a high chest and/or other furniture for the new home of the bride and groom--the sort of furniture that remained in the same families for generations. The high chest in Plate I, for example, was probably made for the wedding of Abigail Olcott (1760-1837) and Alexander King (1741-1831), both of East Windsor, on May 7, 1781. It descended in the family until it was purchased by the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, in 1993. The Kings also purchased from Chapin a set of six side chairs with claw-and-ball feet and interlacing splats. (3) Also in 1781, the high chest in Plate VIII (see also Pl. II) was purchased for another East Windsor couple, Mary Ellsworth (1759-1829) and Chauncey Newberry (1750-1829), whose younger brother, Benjamin Newberry (1765-after 1834), was most probably an apprentice in the Chapin shop at the time.

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Eliphalet Chapin is not known to have signed any of his furniture. Attributions are based largely on four documented sets of Chippendale style chairs and a tripod table. The first set of chairs to be identified, for which the collector and scholar Irving Whitall Lyon (1840-1896) was reportedly shown a bill of sale from Chapin in 1878, belonged originally to Abigail and Alexander King. (4) The other three sets of chairs and the tripod table were made for the 1775 wedding of Ann Grant (1748-1838) and the Reverend John Marsh (1748-1821) of Wethersfield, Connecticut. Ann's father, Ebenezer (1706-1797), recorded in his account book a credit of more than forty-one pounds to Chapin for an itemized list of thirty pieces of furniture on the day before his daughter's wedding on December 6. (5)

Based on general similarities of design, many chairs, high chests with scrolled pediments, and other furniture forms have been attributed to Eliphalet Chapin or to his second cousin and fellow cabinetmaker, Aaron Chapin, in some cases as early as 1930. (6) Numerous misattributions, however, have produced ambiguity and confusion.

In 1990 the Hartford Case Furniture Survey (HCFS), a collaborative research effort that included ourselves, the cabinetmaker and consultant Nickolas Kotula, and later Robert Lionetti, set out to establish more systematic criteria for the attribution of case furniture not only to Eliphalet Chapin but also to other shops in the region. Over the next fourteen years the team examined approximately five hundred pieces of Connecticut River valley case furniture, including about fifty associated with the Chapin tradition. Initially, the latter group included anything that looked like it might be by Chapin, had been attributed to him by others, or had a credible history of ownership in or near East Windsor.