Witness to history: furniture and historic relics

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Debra Schmidt Bach

On April 29, 1789, the United States Congress finalized details for the inauguration of George Washington as the nation's first president, scheduled to take place the following day. Central to the deliberation was the placement and number of chairs needed for the proceedings. In the end, two mahogany armchairs, one now located at the New-York Historical Society (Pl. I), were selected for the president and vice president and placed in the Senate chamber with others "for ... accommodation, [and] ... to signify that no precedence of seats is intended." (1) The magnitude of that event is still palpable today in the steadfast inaugural chair on display, along with many other treasured chairs, desks, and historical relics in the society's Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. The collecting of noteworthy decorative arts began at the society with the 1817 gift of a gilded armchair made for Marie Antoinette (see p. 183, Pl. III). Thereafter, numerous objects associated with local, regional, and national figures and events were donated by descendants, trustees, and collectors. While many objects illustrate key aesthetic developments, others have achieved nearly mythic historical eminence. Like the inaugural armchair; these artifacts remain today as veritable "eyewitnesses" to the political, economic, and social history of the United States. Although only a small fraction are represented in the following pages, this article features highlights from the more than thirty-one thousand decorative arts objects in the society's collection.

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Throughout the nineteenth century, the society received luxury and utilitarian objects from descendants of New York's earliest Dutch and English families. Members of the Beekman family, for instance, donated ancestral manuscripts, portraits, silver, furniture, and architectural fragments. One extraordinary masterpiece is the family coach (Pl. IV), purchased, as noted in his account book, by James Beekman in 1771. (2) Built in approximately 1770, the coach is one of a handful of surviving vehicles used in the American colonies. Although no precise manufacturer is known--only the undercarriage is marked four times "GATES/LONDON"--the coach typifies fine contemporaneous carriages made by European and a few American makers.

Undoubtedly, most carriages and coaches used in the American colonies were imported from England or Europe. (3) Reportedly, "[e]very ship ... from England brought a few," (4) including a coach owned by Washington and presumably used in New York City during his time as president there. (5) By 1764, immigrant coach makers from England and Ireland were advertising in New York City that they could "make, trim, paint, gild and finish, in the most genteel and elegant Taste, all kinds of Coaches, Sedans, and Sleighs." (6) The painted body of the stately Beekman coach is adorned with the family's coat of arms, crest, and applied floral festoons. Its large elegant wheels and tall stature, commanding even today, make it similar to eighteenth-century state coaches made in England, France, and Germany. Prior to the Revolutionary War, coaches were affordable only to the privileged elite. (7) In New York City, coach and carriage owners included members of the prominent De Lancey, Livingston, and Van Cortlandt families. (8) Beekman family lore also suggests a political dimension; during the Revolutionary War, the coach was hidden from British officers at the family's Manhattan country estate Mount Pleasant. (9)

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A nineteenth-century watercolor of Mount Pleasant shows the carriage in front of the Beekmans' Georgian manor house, built in 1763 and 1764 at the present site of Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. In 1874 James William Beekman (1815-1877) presented the society with an elaborately carved and painted chimney breast from the house (Pl. V), which was demolished that year. It remains as one of the few surviving vestiges of American rococo interior architecture. (10)

Like many New York colonial houses, Mount Pleasant was occupied by British officers from 1776 to 1783 and was the headquarters of Generals William Howe (1729-1814) and Sir Henry Clinton (c. 1738-1795). (11) New York was an active colonial port prized by British merchants and military officers. At the onset of hostilities in 1776, British troops seized Manhattan and confiscated patriot properties.

George Washington and the Continental Army were also in periodic residence in the New York region between 1776 and 1780. The society holds a significant collection of artifacts associated with Washington, from this decisive time as well as from his presidency. Two objects that reverberate with the dissonance of the conflict are a stark folding camp cot used by General Washington at Valley Forge during the brutally cold winter of 1777 (Pl. VII) and a robust Chippendale style desk made about 1760 that may have literally supported the death warrant for the British agent Major John Andre (1750-1780). Although these objects are archetypal utilitarian household period furnishings, they also possess strong folkloric connotations.