Measured Drawings
A CABINET MAKER’S PASSION TO DOCUMENT HUNDREDS OF SHAKER PIECES HAS KEPT THE ART FORM ALIVE
By Anastasia Stanmeyer // Photos Courtesy of Hancock Shaker Village and Anne Oppermann
Last August, Hancock Shaker Village curator Linda Johnson received a call out of the blue one day.
Anne Oppermann/Photo by Anastasia Stanmeyer
“Hi, I’m Anne Oppermann. I’d like you to hold an exhibit on my father, Ejner Handberg.”
Handberg’s name didn’t ring a bell, but she invited Oppermann to email a proposal. Two weeks later, Johnson received detailed information about the master cabinetmaker who emigrated from Denmark and who was intimately familiar with Shaker woodworking. Johnson’s interest was piqued.
Oppermann later stopped by to drop off more information on her father. Coincidentally, Hancock Shaker Village, in collaboration with the Danish Cabinetmakers Association, was planning a symposium that weekend. Johnson’s assistant, Kathleen Lynch, invited Oppermann to the event.
Oppermann arrived at Hancock Shaker Village and made her way to a group of visitors gathered outside the Round Stone Barn. They were the master craftsmen from Denmark, and when they realized who she was, they became excited, asking her questions and reacting as though they were in the presence of royalty.
“That day the Danish cabinetmakers were here was the best day ever,” recalls Johnson. “Everything just came together. So many knew Ejner Handberg’s drawings.”
Less than a year after Oppermann made that initial call, she is sitting contently on a stool inside the newly restored Tannery.
She watches an interpreter plane a thick slab of wood as a handful of young children and their mothers closely watch. She thinks of her father. Oh, how he would have loved to be here, working with the wood and talking to an audience. Her gaze turns to the other side of the room, where two large Shaker workbenches are located, one famously made by master craftsman Grove Wright from Mount Lebanon, and where four of her father’s shop drawings of Shaker furniture are displayed in a glass case. The sketches also have been reproduced to a larger size and are exhibited next to original Shaker furniture that they represent. A photograph of her father carving a wooden dipper stands next to the interpretive displays. That same dipper can be viewed inside the glass case, next to original booklets of Handberg’s drawings.
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This relatively small installation is large in significance in the world of Shaker woodworking. Handberg made a name for himself by restoring Shaker objects for collectors. Because he lived in the area where two major Shaker sites are located—Mount Lebanon and Hancock—his restoration work with original Shaker pieces and his replicas kept him busy well into his retirement. He has played a significant role in keeping the art alive through precise scaled drawings found in five volumes that serve as reference for woodworkers throughout the world.
His first book of sketches, Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware Vol I, was published exactly 50 years ago. This year’s anniversary was an incentive to get this installation together when Hancock Shaker Village opened for the season in the spring. The timing also was right because the Tannery was reopening after major restoration work, and Johnson was inspired to reimagine the space inside. Some people in the museum world might say the added installation was put together in lightning speed. That is largely due to Oppermann, who has meticulously accumulated material on her father through the years—a curator’s dream.
When Johnson went to visit Opperman at her home in Lenox, she walked into a relative Shaker shrine. Throughout the home are a number of Handberg’s replicas—a mirror, a set of oval boxes, a two-drawer sewing stand, a candlestand. The dining room table is filled with neat piles of photo-copied and numbered drawings with yellow post-it notes. A large white binder contains newspaper and magazine articles, photographs, and transcriptions of interviews.
This is one of 439 drawings that Handberg created.
Handberg created the largest collection of working drawings of Shaker and 18th-century furniture and woodenware—439, to be exact—all of which appear in his booklets. That enabled the Shaker aesthetic and its iconic designs to be spread beyond the people who traveled to this region. Cabinetmakers could create an object with the same proportions as a Shaker chair or table. They could better understand what sort of design principles informed that Shaker ethos, even if they’d never visited a Shaker village before and maybe they never would in their lifetime.
“This helped to get those designs out there, and we know that because he had a big following back in Denmark, as well,” says Hancock Shaker Village Director Nathaniel Silver, who is thankful that Oppermann reached out when she did, and for Lynch and Johnson’s rapid response in pulling the installation together. “Anybody can take a picture of a work of art or an object, but by bringing his own practical knowledge as a woodworker and as a cabinetmaker, he was thinking about them not just as objects of the past, but as objects of the past that can inform the present.”
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Worn, dog-eared copies of Handberg’s booklets can be found in Hancock Shaker Village’s library for researchers, and at one point his books were sold in the gift shop. Knowledge of him slowly faded at Hancock Shaker Village as time wore on—until now.
Handberg was born in 1902 in Vigorg, Denmark. He came to the United States at the age of 17 and worked for a Danish factory that made crates for transporting blueprints. He answered a newspaper ad: Brooklyn-based Dr. Vander Smithson needed a caretaker for his home on Mount Washington. Handberg got the job, and at age 18, he headed to what would become his lifelong home of the Berkshires.
Anne Oppermann in the Tannery at Hancock Shaker Village with Curator Linda Johnson, right, and Curatorial Assistant Kathleen Lynch./Photo by Anastasia Stanmeyer
One evening after work in Mount Washington, Handberg was fishing in Plantain Pond. He heard the sound of hammers across the lake, took off his clothes, and swam across to check it out. What he found were carpenters putting up a house. He climbed up the dock and asked if they were hiring. The boss drew a line on a board and asked the wet and half-naked young man to cut along the line. Handberg met the challenge, and William Hunt hired him on the spot to build houses.
During the winter, Handberg went back to New York and worked for an Italian family of cabinetmakers, learning the intricacies of the craft. “To be a good cabinetmaker, it depends more on extreme accuracy,” Handberg said in an interview. “Although both require a good deal of skill, I think the carpenter trade is more hard work and speed than the cabinetmaker.”
Years later, Handberg married Hunt’s daughter, Elsie, who was ten years his junior. They moved off the mountain and built their first house and workshop on North Plain Road in Great Barrington, followed by a second house down the road that they called Frog Hollow. In 1952, they moved to Stockbridge. He continued as a builder for 30 years; Elsie worked as a Singer sewing machine instructor in Pittsfield, as well as teaching sewing at Austen Riggs. She also had her own kiln and made dolls.
“Father’s buildings became pieces of furniture. When he built the home of the head of the Schweitzer-Mauduit paper company in Lee—his name was Mintz—it was completely paneled with Karina wood. They had scraps of leftover wood, and he built me a hope chest for my eighth-grade graduation,” says Oppermann, pointing to that very chest in her dining room.
While he was working on the Lloyd estate in Lee (now Devonfield Inn), Handberg made a copy of George Washington’s desk for the owner. It was one of the first important reproductions he made. He built a guesthouse on the estate, as well as an addition to Stockbridge Congregational Church. Norman Rockwell asked him to build props for scenes he was painting and also frames for his pictures. Later, Handberg built Rockwell’s studio on South Main Street from the framework of a dilapidated carriage house. The studio was eventually moved and is now located on the grounds of the Norman Rockwell Museum.
When he retired in 1960, Handberg outfitted a van to make it livable, including custom-built cabinetry, and toured the national parks with Elsie. Their plans to move to Colorado changed when Elsie’s mother’s health began to fail, and Anne began having children. So they built a “chalet” that included a home, gift shop, and workshop, off Route 102 in South Lee.
Handberg turned to making furniture in his retirement, and word spread of his skills. Edward and Faith Andrews, noted authorities and collectors of Shaker furniture, paid the Handbergs a visit. It was through them that Ejner became interested in Shaker furniture. “I didn’t set out to specialize in Shaker furniture. It just happened,” he told The Berkshire Herald in an article published on January 4, 1974.
The Andrews had bought a large number of items from the Shakers when Mount Lebanon closed in 1947, as well as many items from Hancock Shaker Village when it closed in 1969.
(The Andrews were the major donors to Hancock Shaker Village when it reopened as a museum, and Edward Andrews was the village’s first curator. They also donated items to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware; and the American Museum in Bath, England.)
“They heard that Father could repair Shaker furniture, and so they became very close friends,” says Oppermann. “When he would have an authentic Shaker piece come into the shop, he would trace it on cardboard he’d get from the dump that was used to package refrigerators. He ultimately made his reproductions from that and his measurements to do his books. The Andrews were very supportive of this. They felt that it was the only way the Shaker furniture would be truly documented for history.”
Handberg would travel to other museums and measure pieces, like to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. The Andrews encouraged him to publish the drawings, and Norman Simpson, who owned the Berkshire Traveller Press of Stockbridge, heard about the project and offered to take it on. What followed were two years of painstaking work to reduce the precise shop drawings to a book-size format.
The first book published of Handberg’s drawings was released in 1973. Strikingly simple, it contains 80 scale drawings of Shaker chairs, tables, stands, sewing boxes, cupboards, a bed, trestle tables, and other pieces. Interspersed among the drawings were quotations from Shaker writings and catalogues. It was followed by Volume II in 1975 and Volume III in January 1978. He also published Shop Drawings of Shaker Iron & Tinware—another aspect of Shaker craftsmanship that he felt should be documented.
A larger, more detailed book called Measured Drawings of Shaker Furniture & Woodenware contains over 30 Shaker pieces and 17 black-and-white photos of the furniture. In all, he completed six books—the last one was Measured Drawings of Eighteenth-Century American Furniture.
Handberg’s books were the only place where a cabinetmaker could find detailed drawings of furniture and other related items that spanned the range of Shaker innovation and industry. He underplayed that significant point, although he did later realize the importance of what he was doing, says Oppermann. President Jimmy Carter even sent him a personal letter, dated November 2, 1983, that stated, “Your friend, Leo Vaughn, has sent me a copy of your book, Shop Drawings of Shaker Furniture and Woodenware. I am delighted to have this fine information, and I shall look forward to studying many of the drawings. Shaker furniture is especially attractive to me.”
Handberg died in 1985. In 1992, a hardback book that contains the three volumes of Shop Drawings was published. That combined book, as well as the larger Measured Drawings, are now available in Hancock Shaker Village’s gift shop. In all, nearly 200,000 copies of his books have been sold.
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The story of how Oppermann came in possession of her father’s original drawings is worth retelling.
After Handberg did a series of drawings, he sent them to his publisher, and then the publisher mailed the originals back to him. Charlie Flint, well-known antiques dealer and appraiser who is now retired, had a real interest in the Shakers and also in Handberg’s drawings.
“Flint was so impressed with Father’s work,” recalls Oppermann. “He used to go to Father’s shop and watch him make furniture.”
Handberg would create drawings in batches of 20, and after they were returned, he would sign them and sell them to Flint. Each set was in their own folder, labeled according to the book and page numbers.
When Oppermann read in the newspaper that Flint was selling his shop, she wondered what was going to happen to the drawings. She had seen the originals years ago when she asked Flint for six of them that corresponded with Shaker replicas that her children had. She contacted Flint and told him that she wanted to buy the box of sketches, and he eventually agreed. Oppermann had a savings account where she put the royalty checks from the sale of her father’s books and used that money to purchase all the drawings.
On a later visit to Hancock Shaker Village, Oppermann stopped in the gift shop to buy her father’s book for a friend. “I commented to the clerk that I didn’t see any of my dad’s books on the shelf with the other books.” The employee’s response was “Ejner who?” Oppermann went home and told her kids that they needed to do something. They mulled it over, and Oppermann finally called Johnson.
Her father’s sketches, original Shaker pieces, and woodworking tools have come full circle in the Tannery. This building, erected in 1836, was where the Shakers once tanned cow and sheep hides for leather for the whole of Pittsfield. It later became a woodworking shop; a cider press and blacksmith shop were located in the basement, and a stream that runs through one corner of the building was a source of fresh water. A $100,000 restoration job has just been completed, tending to rotted wood in the outside of the building, adding flashing to kick the water off, as well as new siding. In the basement, a platform was built for accessibility.
The timing couldn’t be more perfect for Handberg’s drawings and corresponding pieces to be on permanent installation, annually rotated. Oppermann has plenty of sketches to keep it fresh through the years, and Hancock Shaker Village has corresponding similar pieces to the ones that Handberg drew. Just as the installation identifies the author of the drawings, Johnson is working on the attribution of the original Shaker furniture and woodwork pieces.
The drawings that are exhibited now include a looking glass, candlestand, pine wash-stand, and sewing table.
“These drawings of Shaker artifacts are very precise; they’re beautiful,” noted Johnson. “Ejner had a great love for the Shakers, an affinity with them. We also have a lot of crafts people today and people who want to make furniture. They’re always looking for plans. To be able to have a plan like this also is really helpful for interpreters to continue to make pieces in the Tannery.”
Ejner Handberg’s measured drawings and related Shaker artifacts can be viewed in the newly restored Tannery. A special tour and reception of Hancock Shaker Village’s exhibitions will be held on Thursday, June 29, from 4 to 6 p.m. Anne Oppermann will give remarks at the end of the tour and be available for questions. Go to hancockshakervillage.org for more details.