French furniture in Boston - Current and Coming - Boston Museum of Fine Arts' conservation, exhibit of French furniture suite

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

James Swan, a self-made Scottish immigrant who arrived in Boston around 1765, began as an apprentice in a countinghouse and became a man of international reputation with a sizeable fortune. He accomplished this metamorphosis in two ways: first he married Hepzibah Clarke, a wealthy Bostonian, and second, through his military and political forays, he established friendships with important Frenchmen during the American Revolution. Through these alliances he launched a brilliant and profitable career supplying provisions to the French military during the war between France and Austria in the 1790s. Large quantities of royal possessions, which before the French Revolution embellished royal chateaux such as Marly, Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Fontainebleau, were confiscated and sold at auction or bartered for much needed military supplies beginning in 1792. Swan acquired more than a few of these sumptuous objects, which he subsequently dispatched to his house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where his wife cultivated her taste for things French. Among the objects that descended through the families of the Swans' three daughters are a pair of Sevres porcelain vases, a pair of gilt-bronze andirons, and a suite of ten pieces of furniture, which comprises a bed, two fauteuils, four side chairs, a bergere, a prie-dieu, and a fire screen.

The suite was given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, piecemeal between 1921 and 1979. Since it had been split up between heirs by the 1970s, each piece had undergone different degrees of restoration. Recently the museum has completed an exhaustive study of each object in the suite and has had each conserved to museum standards. To accomplish this, the furniture was sent first to the fine conservation laboratories at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and then to Paris. The suite is being installed in a new gallery devoted to French decorative arts at the museum, which opens on October 9. The story of the complex four-year conservation process appears in Design notes on page 176 of this issue.

In addition to the suite of furniture, the gallery contains important paintings by French artists along with a set of eight panels of boiserie originally designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux for the Hotel de Montmorency in Paris about 1770. The panels were acquired by the medical missionary Peter Parker of Boston about 1850 when the Paris building was being razed. Also on view are portraits of James and Hepzibah Swan by Gilbert Stuart, executed in 1795 and 1806, respectively.

The suite of furniture was made in Paris in 1787 by Jean Baptiste Claude Sene for Marc Antoine Thierry, baron de Ville d'Avray, who was the administrator of the Garde Meuble de la Couronne. Thierry was as adroit in navigating through court circles as Swan was in the mercantile and military spheres. He became premier valet de chambre to the duc du Berry (who became Louis XVI in 1765). A perquisite of this position was access to extra yardage of fabrics woven for royal commissions, which Thierry took advantage of in order to upholster this suite of furniture for his bedchamber and to make window curtains. The original fabric survives in the form of a curtain panel (illustrated at left), which also descended in the Swan family and is now in the museum.

Both Swan and Thierry ended their lives in greatly altered circumstances. Swan died one year after being evicted from his rather commodious accommodations in debtor's prison in Paris, where he had lived for twenty-two years, and Thierry was murdered in prison in 1792. As Eleanor P. DeLorme rightly concludes in her excellent article about this suite of furniture published in The Magazine ANTIQUES for March 1975 (from which much of this information is drawn), "The surviving Swan furniture recalls the great period of French furniture making just before the revolution. It evokes as well the memory of James Swan, who helped to finance that revolution and who profited from it, and of Thierry de Vile d'Avray, who was destroyed by it."