Quebec country furniture at the Shelburne Museum

Interest in Quebec decorative arts has grown rapidly over the last half century. In the 1950s, there was very little information about the furniture made by our neighbors to the north. The notable New York City dealer C. W. Lyon clearly appreciated the so-called salamander armchairs he advertised in The Magazine ANTIQUES in 1955 (Fig 5), although he mistakenly attributed them to New England. However, it was published images such as these that captured the imagination of Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), the founder of the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. With a strong aesthetic sense, Webb was drawn to furniture with striking shapes and painted surfaces, which she avidly collected between about 1940 and 1960, assuming that much of it was made in the United States.

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Since her death, additional research has been conducted by Canadian scholars and published in magazines and monographs. (1) Based on this new information, some pieces in the Shelburne Museum attributed to New England are now seen as having a Quebec origin. (2) The resulting group of twenty-five pieces is the largest collection of French-Canadian furniture in a museum in the United States. An exhibition entitled Quebec Country Furniture, on view at the museum from May 1 until October 31, 2006, is the first time this group has been shown together.

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It is necessary to understand the changing political landscape of Canada to recognize the stylistic evolution of its rich material culture. New France, which began as a trading outpost established by Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) in 1608, was one of the earliest European settlements in North America. France was heavily in debt during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and looked at this western settlement as a profit center through the fur trade and the Atlantic fishery. It was also expected to provide profitable markets for French manufactures at a minimum cost to the mother country.

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Over the next 150 years the colony grew slowly, partly because dissident Huguenots did not emigrate to Canada between the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and about 1715. In 1720 there were 24,000 settlers along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec, Trois Rivieres, and Montreal. By 1754 the population had only grown to 55,000 compared to the American colonies, which had 1.5 million inhabitants at the same time. (3)

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The social structure of New France was a microcosm of the mother country. In North America, the power of the French king was delegated to a governor. A civil administrator, or intendant, controlled the material affairs of the colony; the clergy, particularly the Jesuits and Sulpicians, had charge of spiritual matters; and the seigneurs, whose social status resembled that of the French aristocracy, rented land to the farmers who settled it. (4) Because boats and canoes along the Saint Lawrence River and its tributaries were the only means of transport, surveyed land was laid out in long narrow strips running back from the river so that every parcel had access to the waterway. This resulted in houses clustered together for protection. In 1749 the resulting pattern of settlement was described by the intrepid traveler Pehr Kalm (1716-1779) as "a continuous village, which begins at Montreal and stretches all the way to Quebec." (5) This uninterrupted ribbon of houses was constantly razed by fire.

The earliest buildings of New France were constructed primarily of wood, which was readily available and cheaper than masonry. The settlers' priority was to build houses that could survive the long cold winters and withstand attacks from the Indians. These one- or two-room houses had walls two to four feet thick, steeply gabled roofs designed to shed snow, and one or two chimneys. In 1682, 1845, and 1881, a large part of Quebec burned. Montreal suffered a similar fate in 1721 and 1852, losing two centuries of the handmade objects that expressed the cultural and artistic traditions of French Canada. (6) The image in Figure 4 dramatically depicts one of the worst conflagrations in Canada's history, when more than thirty-one hundred houses and their contents were leveled twice in one month.

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According to one historian:</p> <pre> Once established, the colonists began to think of re-creating the daily life which they had known in France, for although they had arrived with only bare necessities and their courage, the strong traditions of the mother country were still a part of their make-up. (7) </pre> <p>However, most commoners arrived in the New World with a single chest containing their clothes. Only church dignitaries and civil governors had financial means and were able to bring furniture. To furnish their houses, the early settlers relied on woodworkers rather than cabinetmakers.</p> <pre> Menuisiers and charpentiers worked in solid woods by traditional carpenters' techniques while the more elite French ebenistes specialized in complex shaping, carving, inlaid marquetry veneers, ormolu, gilding and [lacquer] finishes. In the small, scattered, and hardly wealthy colony of New France, needs rather than fashion trends governed form and construction. (8) </pre> <p>Furniture was built by local joiners, a talented family member, or even the carpenter who constructed the house. They followed the medieval craft tradition of joining tenoned cross members and mortised uprights, securing them with wooden pins rather than nails or glue. The rustic chair in Figure 10 is clearly homemade, with the top slat cut completely through the back posts rather than stopped. The makers used forged (before 1850) and square (after 1850) nails. They relied on native woods: thick boards of white pine, which were easy to use and resistant to rot, splitting, and warping, supplemented by yellow birch and maple for turned elements. Although oak was plentiful, it was considered too hard to work efficiently.