The nineteenth-century furniture trade in New Orleans

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Stephen G. Harrison

Accurate information about the furniture trade in New Orleans during the nineteenth century has, in the past, been as elusive as the origins of the town's famous cuisine. Much of the speculation has centered on the chiefly rococo revival furniture that fills the plantation houses along the Mississippi River and throughout the Deep South. Antiquarians in the region reinforced the colonial revival notion that the furniture of their antebellum ancestors had been made by Francois Seignouret (1785-1852) and Prudent Mallard, both of New Orleans.(1) However, from surviving documents as well as extant examples it becomes apparent that beginning about 1840 New Orleans was primarily a center for retailing rather than manufacturing household furnishings.(2)

Cabinetmakers thrived in New Orleans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, favoring rococo designs in the earlier period and then gradually turning to neoclassical furniture in the nineteenth century.(3) The tea table of 1819 shown in Plate IV reflects this mixture of styles. It was made for the Poydras Female Orphan Asylum in New Orleans, where it was recently rediscovered, making it one of the few surviving pieces of early Louisiana furniture with a documented date and provenance.

By the mid-1830s the extraordinary success of the cotton market produced a surge in population and wealth in New Orleans that led to an increase in demand for household furnishings. It became more profitable for cabinetmakers to import goods from established centers of production in the Northeast and abroad than to buy expensive new machinery for their shops.

Dutreuil Barjon was one such craftsman who began importing goods to augment his inventory. A free man of color(4) who had come to the city from Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) in 1813, Barjon had learned his craft during a three-year apprenticeship to another free black cabinetmaker, Jean Rousseau (w.c. 1810-1837). By 1821 Barjon had his own shop and made furniture in the prevailing Grecian taste (see Pl. II). In 1835 he expanded his business by entering into a co-operative agreement with Christophe Voigt (w.c. 1835-1840) to import furniture from Hamburg and Berlin.(5) Included in the agreement is a provision that Barjon choose all the pieces to be shipped since he alone knew the taste of fashionable New Orleans. The strong Biedermeier influence evident in the chest of drawers that bears the label of Barjon's son (Pl. III) suggests that he might have used a German chest in his father's shop as a prototype.(6) It is unclear how long Barjon and Voigt maintained their agreement, but its existence is indicative of the changes that took place in the New Orleans furniture trade in the 1830s and 1840s.

The ships that filled the slips along the Mississippi were loaded predominantly with cotton for the mills of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. On their return they brought furniture, ceramics, tools, and other goods from the northern states. Often, especially in the 1830s, merchant seamen would spread their venture cargo along the levees and wharves, placing newspaper advertisements to attract customers. Soon, however, northern merchants, seeing an opportunity, opened retail furniture and upholstery shops in New Orleans, the fastest growing marketplace in the country.

Joseph W. Meeks and Company of New York City opened a furniture business in New Orleans by 1830. Anthony Rasch (c. 1778-1858) had moved to the city a decade earlier from Philadelphia to sell silver, jewelry, linens, and other fancy goods. Francois Seignouret was selling wine from his family's vineyard in Bordeaux, France, along with a stock of furniture. Between 1835 and 1843 the following entrepreneurs opened stores in New Orleans and became the biggest names in the furniture business: Cyrus Flint, James H. Jones, and Henry Weil from New York City; Calvin Chandler Sampson, Isaac Keen, and Daniel Kelham from Massachusetts; William and James McCracken from Ireland; and Henry Siebrecht from Germany.(7) Prudent Mallard came to the city from France via New York City during this period as well.(8) Many of the local craftsmen practicing between 1800 and 1810 either went to work for these merchants as upholsterers, joiners and clerks; became entrepreneurs themselves; or went out of business. According to census and tax reports, a few struggled along doing custom work or piecework.

By 1850 the New Orleans furniture trade was almost entirely dominated by a small number of dealers mostly from the Northeast, France, and Germany.(9) Fortunately, a few labeled pieces from these cabinet warerooms survive (see Pls. V, VII), demonstrating the popularity of the neoclassical taste in the city well into the 1840s. The armoire shown in Plate VI is labeled by a firm that imported most of its furniture from the Boston region, according to the ship manifests.

Perhaps the most fashionable of all antebellum furniture shops in New Orleans was that of Prudent Mallard. However, according to contemporary accounts, he suffered several setbacks during unstable times leading to the Civil War. In an agrarian economy much depended on the sale of the crops, and credit was readily extended to customers with good reputations. Unfortunately, the richest customers were likely to be planters or cotton factors who might easily default on their debts if a crop failed. Because he had extended too much credit to his customers, Mallard was forced to ask for a respite from his own creditors on several occasions, most notably in 1855, barely two years after his portrait was painted in Paris (Pl. IX). The resulting bankruptcy inventory of his shop reveals much about the character of his business at the height of his career.(10)