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Brian Doucette with the hutch that he’s spent thousands of hours investigating.
Photograph by Louise Stoker.
Brian Doucette has purchased a lot of cool stuff over the years antique Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Meiji-period Japanese panels and an 18th-century Jacopo Brandini violin he picked up for $200 and later sold for $9,000. But the item that has most captured his imagination the one he has now spent 3,000 hours researching, trying to unlock its secrets is a wooden hutch he bought from a random couple in 2016. “Anybody in antiques always says, ‘One day I’m going to find a Monet,’ ” Doucette says. “This is my Monet. This has been the quest.”