Allan Breed

Allan Breed received the 2012 Cartouche Award at the Society’s banquet in Colonial Williamsburg on January 27, 2012, during the Working Wood in the 18th Century conference. The furniture historian Brock Jobe introduced him, and SAPFM president Bob Mustain presented the award.

Breed has spent his life around antiques. His father, a part-time archaeologist, took him along on digs, and the curiosity about old things that began there led him to the furniture in the family attic and then to antiques dealers and shows. At eighteen he went to work as a “go-for” in the restoration lab of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under an old-school Italian cabinetmaker who taught him, among much else, the virtues of hide glue and veneer restoration.

In 1976 he took his first shop space, in the Button Factory mill building in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, alongside several other beginning cabinetmakers. He later built a shop in York, Maine, with a friend and worked there until 2002, when he moved to a third-floor workshop in a restored textile mill on the Salmon Falls River in Rollinsford, New Hampshire. He builds and teaches there today.

He is best known for his reproduction of the Nicholas Brown desk and bookcase, a Newport masterpiece; the commission brought him an article in the New York Times. His own favorite was a set of a dozen McIntire shield-back side chairs. His work has been featured in Antiques and Fine Art, Fine Woodworking, The Christian Science Monitor and Early American Life, has been exhibited in several large museums, and is in the permanent collections of many others. He has written numerous articles on cabinetmaking and has lectured at Winterthur, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Teaching is the part of the work he enjoys most. At the Allan Breed School of Woodworking he has guided woodworkers from around the country through chair making, bombé chests, Rococo carving and Goddard-Townsend secretaries. Carving is at the top of the list: he describes the reward of teaching it as “the chance to give people the ability to do something they didn’t think they could do.” He has also given freely to his region’s historic houses and craft groups. At the time of his award he chaired the board of the Wentworth-Gardner House Museum in Portsmouth, and he has contributed to the New Hampshire Furniture Masters, the Guild of New Hampshire Woodworkers, the Old Berwick Historical Society, Strawbery Banke and the New Hampshire Historical Society, whose restored properties hold some of his donated work.

For the Society he has written “Carving a Rococo Shell” (American Period Furniture, 2011), “A Copley Portrait Gets a New Frame” (American Period Furniture, 2017) and “A Teachable Moment” (Pins & Tales, Fall 2018).

From Thomas P. Hand Sr.’s profile in American Period Furniture (2012). Hand, a student and friend, nominated him for the award:

… as one who has taken many of his courses, I can say that I have become a better carver than I ever felt possible. When Al teaches, it is always in an encouraging and enjoyable environment. He has told me many times that he has so much yet to learn and so little spare time in which to learn it.

Watch him at work: Allan Breed: The Modern Master (Fine Woodworking, 2017), and two films made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2011–12 Duncan Phyfe exhibition: turning and carving a bedpost and carving a bow knot and thunderbolt crest.

His school: allanbreed.com