Southern furniture - Equitable Gallery, New York, New York

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1997 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Since it was founded in 1926, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia, has been collecting American furniture, and pieces made in the South were among its first acquisitions. At the outset, the goal was primarily furniture made before 1800 in coastal Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. More recently the curatorial staff has extended the boundaries to include furniture made before 1830 in Washington, D.C., West Virginia, western Maryland, and all of South Carolina, as well as Virginia and North Carolina. The southern furniture collection today numbers some seven hundred pieces, but Williamsburg does not yet own examples from Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Mississippi River valley - a gap it hopes to fill in the future.

Approximately fifty examples of southern furniture from the Williamsburg collection will be on view at the Equitable Gallery in New York City from September 11 to October 31. Entitled Furniture of the American South: Masterworks from Colonial Williamsburg, this is the first major exhibition of southern furniture in the city. The show is a preview of a much larger exhibition entitled Furniture of the American South, which will open in the DeWitt Wallace Gallery at Colonial Williamsburg on November 8 and continue through December 1998.

The Williamsburg exhibition and its excellent catalogue represent the most comprehensive study of furniture made in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas in more than forty years and present much new information. Pieces made in England but with a history of use in the South are also included.

The curators of the exhibition and the authors of the catalogue have divided the South not by states but into its three principal regions: the Chesapeake, the Low Country, and the Back Country. The Chesapeake region can be considered the cradle of the South since the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Their followers fanned out along the coast northward from Virginia to Maryland, west to the Maryland and Virginia Piedmont, and south to the Albemarle Sound of North Carolina. While the early colonists were English, the South was settled by Europeans from many nations. Some entered through southern ports and others migrated from northern Colonies (particularly to the Back Country), thus creating a multicultural tradition in architecture and the decorative arts.

Tobacco was the bedrock of the southern economy during its early history, but it exhausted the land fairly rapidly and required intensive hand labor. Thus growers were periodically forced to move on in their pursuit of fertile land. Indentured servants were brought over by the newly wealthy planters in such numbers that by the latter half of the seventeenth century they accounted for half the European immigrants in the Colonies. While Africans arrived as early as 1619, the slave trade was not fully established until about forty years later.

Since the economy was agrarian, the population was widely dispersed in rural towns and on large plantations instead of in cities like those that were rapidly glowing in the North. Because this was a society on the move, dwellings erected by the lower classes answered simple and immediate needs and those of the landowners, who were not always compelled to move when they acquired new land, were more grand. The furniture in the South during these years, not surprisingly, directly reflected the owner's station in society. Locally made pieces in unsophisticated rural styles answered the needs of the middle and lower classes, while more expensive imported pieces, mostly from London, were acquired by the gentry.

Urban centers grew during the eighteenth century but it was not until the early part of the nineteenth century that cities like Norfolk and Petersburg, Virginia, and Baltimore could rival in size their counterparts in the North. During the late eighteenth century the taste for English furniture waned and cabinet-makers in northern cities exported their wares to the South. Cabinetmakers in southern cities also enjoyed local patronage. Their elegant pieces have distinct parallels with examples illustrated in English design books, which found currency among the craftsmen in urban locales, thereby reducing the need to import English goods.

The catalogue, by Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown, contains an essay by J. Thomas Savage. It is copublished by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Harry N. Abrams and may be obtained for $75.00 (hard covers) from Colonial Williamsburg at 800-446-9240.