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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;James Conrad, post: 1065088, member: 5066&quot;]Recently, The Decorative Arts Trusts gave a grant to Emelie Gevalt to study these chests as a group, there has been no scholarship on these Crosman chests since Esther Stevens Frazer in 1933.</p><p>Among the questions Gevalt seeks answers are:</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot; Due to the early work of pioneering antiques scholar Esther Stevens Frazer (1898-1945), these splendidly painted objects have historically been attributed to the hand of a single maker: Robert Crosman (1707-1799), a drum-maker and member of a family of craftsmen working in the eponymous town in southeastern Massachusetts from approximately 1727 to 1742. Since the time of Frazer’s seminal 1933 article, “The Tantalizing Chests of Taunton,” curators and scholars have analyzed selected chests, but an extensive consideration of the full group – expanded more than two-fold since the 1930s – has never been published. As a result, neither Frazer’s original findings nor her Colonial Revival viewpoint has been systematically addressed. Multiple questions remain about the chests: most notably, was Frazer correct in her attribution to Robert Crosman? Is there now further evidence to strengthen or perhaps refute her claims? Who, in fact, was Esther Stevens Frazer, and how might elements of her personal and cultural circumstances have influenced her scholarship and our subsequent understanding of the Taunton group? Finally, how can the chests’ changing interpretations over time inform our own present day understanding of these objects’ importance? This project will seek to answer these questions by undertaking a systematic examination of the surviving twenty-six Taunton chests, re-investigating the chests’ significance across an extended timeline by considering Frazer as both a secondary and primary source. Ultimately, as this thesis will show, Frazer’s attribution remains credible, with some of its weaknesses strengthened significantly by the consistency of the expanded body of Taunton chests and by the discovery of new evidence linking Crosman definitively to the cabinet-making trade. Nonetheless, a consideration of Frazer herself as a historical subject also reveals the extent to which her scholarship was influenced by personal and cultural proclivities. A re-investigation of Frazer’s work as a primary source emphasizes the shifts that have taken place in the interpretation of Taunton chests over the centuries, with twentieth-century owners casting the objects as symbols of a simpler time while leaving aside the chests’ original evocations, to the eighteenth-century eye, of abundance and sophisticated international taste.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>Gevalt with a couple chests during her investigation</p><p>[ATTACH=full]209187[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]209188[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]209189[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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