American painted furniture: A new perspective on its decoration and use - Winterthur - Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum's collection

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Wendy A. Cooper

Although late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American painted furniture has been studied and written about by numerous scholars over the last quarter century, most have explored its makers, patrons, and regional origins. Few have considered the rooms that painted furniture originally occupied, how it was used, the significance of its decorative motifs, and its relationship to the outdoors. Winterthur's recent acquisition of a brilliant red-painted Baltimore card table (Pl. III) and the discovery of the provenance of a painted armchair (Pl. II) acquired by Henry Francis du Pont (seep. 154, Pl. I) in 1947 have raised some tantalizing speculations and significant theories about the role of painted furniture in fashionable Federal interiors.

In the late 1780s and early 1790s, increasing numbers of avant-garde Americans adopted the European fashion in domestic architecture of oval, elliptical, or octagonal rooms. More than coincidental may be the fact that a number of the owners of houses with these elegant rooms also owned handsome English or American suites of painted, cane-seated furniture. This article will explore the possibility that such suites were, in fact, acquired specifically for these special rooms, which often overlooked gardens. Period visual documentation supports the premise that this light, movable furniture was sometimes brought out onto piazzas or lawns in the heat of a summer afternoon or evening (see Pls. I, Ia). (1) Moreover, the ornament on this furniture frequently represents a reflection of the exterior landscape as well as the activities that may have taken place in the garden rooms.

From the late 1780s, onward, more and more Americans traveled abroad and became aware of prevailing fashions in Europe and England. Imported publications also acquainted well-to-do Americans with trends and tastes that they could adopt in order to he as fashionable as their counterparts across the Atlantic. As early as 1757 the architect and designer William Chambers (1726-1796) observed a taste for the Chinese in fashionable circles in England, writing that "The moveables of the Saloon consist of Chairs, Stools and Tables, made somctimes of rosewood, ebony, or lacquered work, and sometimes of bambou only, which is cheap, and nevertheless very neat." (2) In 1802 the saloon of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton was fitted up with a set of thirty-six chairs with cane backs and seats made of beech in imitation of bamboo. Chinoiserie chandeliers and pelmets, fretwork cornices, and "India" wallpaper further ornamented the room, creating a splendid and exotic gardenlike setting. (3)

From the last quarter of the eighteenth century onward in England, painted, cane-seated furniture was used in bedrooms as well as large entertaining spaces. Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) made green and ivory painted seating furniture for the best bed and dressing rooms at Paxton House in Berwickshire, Scotland, and cane-seated white and green furniture for David Garrick's (1717-1779) dressing room at his villa in Hampton. (4) A set of ten cane-seated "rout chairs" attributed to Chippendale was made for Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire about 1775. (5) In his Cabinet Dictionary (1803) Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) described "ROUT CHAIRS" as "small painted chairs with rush bottoms, lent out by cabinet makers for hire, as a supply Of seats at general entertainments, or feasts." (6) Further supporting the use of this type of furniture for both bedrooms and routs is Rudolph Ackermann's 1814 illustration of "Bed Room Chairs" (Pl. V), which he described as light chairs intended for best bed-chambers, for secondary drawi ng-rooms, and occasionally to serve for routs." (7)

Between 1780 and 1810, the United States witnessed the growth of significant mercantile wealth and accompanying changes in architecture and lifestyles. Some of the richest and most avant-garde residences built in the United States at this time incorporated rooms specifically intended for large entertainments, and sometimes referred to as "saloons" or "salons." Frequently they faced south, opening onto piazzas or terraces overlooking impressive gardens. Indeed, some of these rooms may have functioned almost as "garden rooms" or conservatories, like the salon at the Calvert family's Riversdale in Riverdale, Maryland, which was filled with "lemon-trees, geraniums, polianthusses [Polianthes], heliotropes, and other plants, which in the summer evenings, invite the hummingbirds to taste of their sweetness." (8) This south-facing room three triple-hung sash windows that opened onto a covered portico with steps leading down to terraced gardens. The original plan for its interior decoration noted it was to be "painted in imitation of marble with the pilasters and ornamentation white." (9) Perhaps this treatment was intended to suggest an outdoor colonnade, echoing the pillars of the portico. Some moms of this type were even furnished with mirrored doors on the interior walls.

Perhaps no urban center could boast of as much growth and post-revolutionary wealth as Baltimore, and many newly constructed country houses circled the city by about 1805. Baltimore is noted also for its production of painted furniture, and the surviving suites of furniture from Baltimore houses suggest correspondences between avant-garde garden rooms, gardens, and the use of this furniture. The card table in Plate III, a superlative example of Baltimore painted furniture recently acquired by Winterthur, may well have been part of a larger suite; a matching pier table exists, but to date no seating forms are known. (10) Although a number of the card table's features are typical of the region and period (the imaginary landscapes in oval and half-oval reserves, the mahogany upper top, and the gold acanthus leaves surmounting the turreted tops of the legs), the square tapered legs, the lattice decoration across the skirt, and the leaf-and-berry motif down the legs are unusual. The high quality of the decoration and the density of the mahogany used in the top suggest that this was a very costly object. The leaf-and-berry decoration on the legs is known only on the tablet tops of chairs from a suite of furniture once owned by William Waln (1775-1826) of Philadelphia. (11) The red "lacquer" color and the delicate Chinese-inspired lattice ornament across the skirt lend a chinoiserie taste to the table. (12)