For centuries Boston has been one of the most important furniture-making centers in America. Soon after the town's founding in 1630, Boston's joiners and turners were the first craftsmen to make furniture in British North America, and the city's cabinetmakers contributed to the art and craft of furniture making throughout the elegant colonial and federal periods. Its factories and designers have also been a source of fine furniture, creating major pieces in the various revival styles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Massachusetts...

New Perspectives on Boston Furniture gathers together nineteen essays first delivered at the Winterthur Museum's 2013 Furniture Forum. It amply illustrates how research concerning one of America's most productive centers of furniture-making has diversified in the forty years since the Colonial Society of Massachusetts published Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century (also distributed by Virginia), the proceedings of a similar conference held in 1973. The essays place less emphasis on connoisseurship and instead devote greater attention to techniques of construction and...