AFA 22nd Anniversary

Antiques & Fine Art 107 2022 W e are so accustomed to seeing art and antiques in museums, galleries, and collectors’ homes that it’s hard to imagine them in their original settings. A very few house museums are time capsules, where the art and furnishings come down together intact. They are the rarest and most precious thing in museumdom. The next best thing is when objects associated with a house and family drift back after many years and become part of a focused and coherent restoration and furnishing plan. During my curatorial career, I loved any chance to bring something home—to repatriate things to the settings from which they originated. While doing field research for The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Vall ey, the exhibition staged at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1985, I befriended some of the few remaining old timers with root ties going back generations and a few heirlooms to prove it. Several were lenders to that exhibition. My favorite was Hildred Sperry Raymond (1907–1992), from Old East Windsor Hill—an area famous in antiques circles as the home of cabinetmaker Eliphalet Chapin (1741–1807) and clockmaker Daniel Burnap (1759–1838). Among her family heirlooms was a tall clock (Fig. 1) with an engraved dial signed by her ancestor David Ellsworth (1742–1821), whose son, Deacon Erastus Ellsworth (1790–1879), had lived in her house. After Sperry’s death, the family heirlooms were divided between her two daughters. Sperry Raymond’s daughter who lived nearby, in a house that had belonged to clockmaker Daniel Burnap, passed away in 2020; she had inherited the Ellsworth clock. Shortly afterward, I received a call from her son, who said: “The house will be sold, contents mostly dispersed. Can you help us find a museum buyer for the clock who will keep it local?” Sperry Raymond’s grandchildren knew their grandmother would want future generations in the family to be able to see the clock, even if they would no longer own it. Clockmaker David Ellsworth’s brother Oliver Ellsworth (1745–1809) (Fig. 2) was a bona fide “Founding Father.” A member of the Continental Congress, he represented Connecticut at the Federal Convention in 1787, where he helped draft the United States Constitution and co-authored the Connecticut Compromise with Roger Sherman. He represented Connecticut in the first U.S. Senate, was appointed third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and undertook a diplomatic mission to France on behalf of the Adams administration. Oliver Ellsworth retired to Elmwood, his family’s estate in Windsor, where he headed the building committee for the new fourth meeting house (circa 1798) of the Congregational Church. The Ellsworth family had ties to this North Windsor neighborhood extending back to the seventeenth century. His brother David lived nearby. It was here that Oliver and his wife, Abigail, hosted George Washington during his political tour of New England in 1789, as well as John Adams in 1799. In 1792, Oliver commissioned the painter Ralph Earl’s (1751–1801) monumental portrait of he and his wife, a copy of which fills the north wall of the great parlor of Elmwood; the original is in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. In 1903, Oliver Ellsworth’s heirs donated Elmwood to the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution (CTDAR), becoming one of the first house museums in Connecticut (Fig. 3); also referred to as the Oliver Ellsworth Homestead. Collections were another matter. Only a few things remained or were later donated back. Compared with the stature of his younger brother, Oliver, David Ellsworth’s paper trail is sparse. He was not one of the more prominent or prolific eighteenth-century Connecticut clockmakers, though he may have studied and/or worked with Daniel Burnap in East Windsor, who was prolific and trained several apprentices. David pops up a couple of times in the Hartford Courant —mostly with land transactions and business ventures—and one time, advertising clocks (Fig. 4). Like most artisans of the time, he was primarily a farmer, with clockmaking being a sideline in a world where multi-occupational work was the norm. The Ellsworth clock is likely the one listed at $12 in David’s son Deacon Erastus Ellsworth’s estate inventory. It remained in his house, where I first saw it, until Sperry’s passing in the 1990s. Fig. 2: John Trumbull (1745-1807), Portrait of Oliver Ellsworth, 1792. Oil on wood. H. 3¾, W. 3⅛ in. Trumbull Collection, Yale University Art Gallery (1832.44).