The nineteenth-century furniture trade in New Orleans

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Stephen G. Harrison

Mallard's wares were sumptuous and expensive and included silk brocades, lampas, damasks, netting, and passementerie for curtains and upholstery; Brussels, ingrain, and Axminster carpeting; paintings and prints; marble and bronze sculptures; stoves; and linens, cutlery, porcelain,(11) and glassware for the table. Mirrors and furniture amounted to only 16 percent of the value of his stock. He had everything needed to furnish a house in the grandest taste. Mallard himself advertised his shop as a "bazaar" in local newspapers, writing:

This establishment is emphatically a curiosity depot and presents the most extensive assortment of everything rare, rich, and beautiful, comprising works of skill and art as varied as the fancy could imagine.(12)

Mallard's inventory also lists his accounts receivable of more than thirty-eight thousand dollars. His debtors included the owners of almost every large plantation along the Mississippi and some in Natchez, Mississippi; New Orleans merchants and bankers; and even the governor of the local United States mint. Mallard himself owed money to Alexander Roux (1813-1886) in New York City and to Roux's brother, Frederick, in Paris, as well as another cabinet-making firm there.(13) This preference for French goods was widespread at the time. Alexander Jackson Downing wrote in 1850, "There is, at the present moment, almost a mania in the cities, for expensive French furniture and decorations."(14)

Despite the fact that French taste dominated the mid-century furniture market in New Orleans, Mallard and his closest competitor Henry Siebrecht (1805-1890)(15) seem to have been the only retailers to import directly from France with any regularity. Design sources like those illustrated in Plates VIII and X must have been both familiar and influential in guiding Mallard's choices for his customers.(16) The armoire shown in Plate XI, for example, closely resembles the design in Plate X.

High-style furnishings from France were expensive and merchants like Mallard and Siebrecht, who dealt exclusively in this range, were tied directly to the financial successes and failures of their clients and consequently experienced extreme economic highs and lows. Much more stable and lucrative was the middle-class market dominated in New Orleans by Sampson and Keen (1846-1864), which became C. C. Sampson (1864-1868), and then Sampson Brothers (1868-1874); and William and John McCracken (1832-1840), which became William McCracken (18401860), then William and James McCracken (1860-1872), and finally James McCracken and George Brewster (1872-1880). Surviving inventories and receipts suggest that they dealt primarily in furniture and left the sale of fancy goods to Mallard and Siebrecht.

A court case resulting from Mallards 1855 bankruptcy illustrates the division of the market and the co-operative nature of the furnishings trade. In May 1855 Mallard sued James R. Bisland of Natchez for the $837.63 Bisland owed him for carpeting and window curtains.(17) Mallard's salesclerk James P. Harris testified that Isaac Keen (b. 1810) of Sampson and Keen brought Bisland into Mallards shop to order carpets and draperies to match the upholstery of the furniture Bisland had just bought from Keen.(18) The fact that a principal from one firm actually accompanied his customer to another store to purchase coordinating furnishings that were probably more expensive than the furniture itself reveals the competitive yet co-operative nature of the trade. Typical of other mercantile relationships around the city, rival dealers like Keen and Mallard often put aside their competitive differences to stand witness for one another in court cases, mortgages, real estate sales, and inventories.