The chest-on-chest

The chest-on-chest is a piece of furniture that embodies the central fraud at the heart of Hobart and Blackwell's business, a "changeling" created by James Hobart from salvaged antique parts and sold by Theodore Decker as a genuine eighteenth-century masterpiece. It is the object that brings Decker into conflict with the blackmailer Lucius Reeve, a confrontation that nearly destroys Decker's life and career before being eclipsed by the far greater secret of the stolen Fabritius painting.

Creation and Nature

The chest-on-chest was not a single, authentic antique but a composite piece, a "changeling" as Hobart called his restorations. Hobart had taken a genuinely antique but otherwise undistinguished chest-on-chest of the period and affixed to its top a carved phoenix ornament that he had salvaged from a Thomas Affleck piece, a far more valuable and important Philadelphia-made item. This act of combining salvaged parts from different pieces into a new whole was a practice Hobart had engaged in for virtually his whole working life, driven by a craftsman's desire to rescue beautiful remnants from damaged furniture. The storage space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was crammed full of such pieces with tags going back thirty years or more. Decker, who had admired Hobart's changelings for years and even helped work on some of them, was himself thunderstruck when he first discovered the full extent of these creations in storage, realizing that what looked like real Hepplewhite and Sheraton were in fact beautiful "young Frankensteins" that were in some cases faithful models of the period, all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

Sale and Confrontation

Decker sold the chest-on-chest to Lucius Reeve for seventy-five thousand dollars, representing it as a genuine Thomas Affleck piece. When Reeve discovered the fraud, Decker attempted to salvage the situation by offering to buy the piece back at a premium. Reeve, however, refused, and instead began a campaign of harassment, sending a series of troubling, handwritten, unsigned letters on blue-bordered correspondence cards. The letters grew more insistent over time, with Reeve writing, "It is getting on for three months since I made what, by any standards, is a fair and sensible proposal" and later, "Your silence is not acceptable." The confrontation escalated when Reeve wrote directly to Hobart, forcing Decker to confess his fraud to his partner. Decker then devised a scheme to create a false provenance for the piece, enlisting Platt Barbour to pose as a seller who could verify a back-dated bill of sale, offering Platt ten percent of the piece's price for his cooperation.

Revelation and Significance

The chest-on-chest was the catalyst that forced Decker to confess his years of fraud to Hobart, a confession that left Hobart stunned and deeply troubled. However, the chest-on-chest was merely the opening gambit in Reeve's larger scheme. When Decker met Reeve for lunch at a Tribeca restaurant, Reeve revealed that he knew far more than the furniture fraud. He knew about the museum bombing, about Welty Blackwell's death, and he directly accused Decker of having stolen The Goldfinch. "You were with Welton Blackwell and his niece, you were all three of you in Gallery 32 and you were the only person to walk out of there. And we know what else walked out of Gallery 32, don't we?" Reeve offered to buy the painting for half a million dollars, threatening to phone the art-crimes division of the FBI if Decker refused. The chest-on-chest, therefore, was not the true object of Reeve's interest but the means by which he identified Decker and attempted to force him to surrender the far more valuable and famous stolen masterpiece.