Description:
Joined chest decorated with a variation of the "sunflower" motif over two drawers covered with traces of old red and black paint, which was said to have been owned in the Bushnell and Dolbear families of Montville and Norwich, Connecticut. The sunflower/marigold motif cannot be traced directly to the English shop traditions of the first generation of settlers in the Connecticut Valley. Like the so-called "Hadley" chests made in western Massachusetts, the carving style is a hybridized product of second-generation craftsmen who drew on an amalgam of traditions, not necessarily English, to furnish the households of their properous neighbors. This chest may represent the workmanship of Peter Blin (c.1639-1725) of Wethersfield, Connecticut, who combined the London-style of applied moldings and turnings with carved designs aligned with his family's French-speaking origins in the Channel Islands and Europe. It is thought that Peter Blin, who spoke French, emigrated from Holland to England, and then to Wethersfield in the mid 1670s where he introduced a variant of French provincial furniture to central and southern Connecticut. Blin is known to have made furniture and to have owned the lathe necessary to have created the distinctive turnings on this chest. He sold a chest for ten shillings and two dozen trenchers for two shillings to Peter Bulkeley in 1681; trenchers, or wooden plates, would have been turned on a lathe. The chest survives in an amazing state of preservation with its full height and original wooden pulls, cotter-pin hinge, and red and black painted moldings used to simulate exotic woods such as rosewood and ebony. The front has three panels carved with stylized sunflowers or marigolds and leaves, and the initials "H W" (not yet identified) in the center panel in place of the usual roses. Ebonized split baluster turnings have been applied between the panels and on the drawers (now missing) and sides of the drawers (only 2 1/2 left). There is a mid-molding below the panels above two long drawers, which have egg appliques and wood knobs, and a molded base over four stile feet. The sides have an upper octagonal shaped panel with a center egg applique and two lower molded rectangular panels. The rectangular, molded hinged lid opens to a well with a till.

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