Inexpensive, highly decorative painted seating furniture found great favor in the early nineteenth century. Interchangeable factory-produced parts, such as front legs, back stays, and crest rails, provided potential for a wide variety of models. In the Bayou Bend chairs, the round front legs with ring turnings at the top relate to those seen on a genre of Baltimore painted chairs, while the bobbin-like ornament of the seat rail appears on a group of Philadelphia Empire-style furniture. That chairs of this sort had geographically wide-ranging ownership may simply be a reflection of broad patterns of trade.

Technical notes: Maple (rear legs, rear stretcher), hickory (side stretchers), yellow poplar (front and right seat rails), soft maple (front stretcher, front legs), hard maple (stay rail, front corner seat block). The painted decoration is original. The cream-colored base is now yellowed and darkened by the varnish that covers it. The composition is well developed and the decoration applied with speed and confidence. The front stretcher is partially turned up at a slight angle in order to present the faux turned decoration to the eye of the viewer. The rush seat is also original. The nails in the side panels that cover the seat show no indications of nail removal and resultant loss of paint decoration (examined in UV light).

Related examples: For Baltimore leg design, see Elder 1972, nos. 37, 40; for a Philadelphia seat rail, see Garvan 1987, p. 71; a rosewood-grained pair at Winterthur attributed to Baltimore have identical painted anthemion stay rails but a tablet crest rail (Montgomery 1966b, no. 466; Evans 1996, p. 169. figs. 4–18); a rosewood-grained example at the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan, is identical in form except for the stay rail (Fales 1972, fig. 309); a third variant painted yellow ocher has different stay and crest rails (Fales 1972, fig. 308).

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.