Stanley and Polly Stone of Fox
Point, Wisconsin, began collecting American furniture in 1946 when they purchased
an early nineteenth-century secretary-and-bookcase made in Salem, Massachusetts.
The couple did not set out to become major collectors, but within four years,
they had acquired twenty-eight additional antique furniture forms.
In a newspaper article in 1959 the Stones openly acknowledged their increasingly
obsessive collecting habit, jokingly describing themselves as stricken with
"virus antiquarium."
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After discovery of the fakes in the early 1990s, Mrs. Stone insisted that they be exhibited and used for educational purposes rather than hidden away in storage (Mr. Stone passed away in 1987). Thereafter, the Chipstone Foundation, under the direction of Executive Director Luke Beckerdite, aggressively acquired antiques of the highest quality and historical significance to expand and refine the collection. In keeping with her wishes and the Stones’ interest in furthering scholarship in the field of American decorative arts, all of these fakes appear in Furniture Fakes in the Chipstone Collection in the 2002 volume of the Chipstone Foundation’s scholarly journal American Furniture. |
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As these circa 1975 views of the living room at Chipstone reveal, the Stones especially favored antique furniture from the major northern colonial centers—namely, Portsmouth, Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia. But these photographs also tell another tale, because some of the "best" pieces shown are now recognized to be either complete fakes or authentic forms with deliberately masked alterations. This revelation is not a criticism of the Stones, for both were knowledgeable collectors. Rather, our understanding of period technology and ability to identify bad pieces today is much more advanced than it was when the Stones began buying antique furniture more than fifty years ago. |