With its reeded stiles and boxy seat, this side chair reflects both New York and Philadelphia design, while the large inlaid oval of light-colored wood on the tablet relates more to slightly earlier furniture made in the Boston-Salem area of Massachusetts. The stay rail of interlaced ovals and the break of the front legs below the seat rail are unusual details; the overall result is something difficult to place. However, the use of birch as a secondary wood as well as the inlay is seen in Piedmont, Georgia, furniture of this period, and the overscale bold oval recalls the ornament of a Georgia sideboard, suggesting a Georgia provenance for this example.

Technical notes: Mahogany, birch (inlaid oval panel); birch (right and rear seat rails, right front corner block).

Related examples: A c. 1810 sideboard in the collection of MESDA is made of birch and ornamented with overscale, slightly naive oval inlays, dark as opposed to light, which relate in concept to the oval on the tablet of this chair (Hind 1979, p. 72). A chest of drawers thought to be from the Augusta area features birch drawers framed in dark cherry (Green 1976a, no. 122). For other examples made of birch, see Green 1976a, nos. 4, 105, 111–13, 138, 144. The Bayou Bend chair was documented in the early 1980s in MESDA’s survey of southern decorative arts (ID no. S-11671). A pair of southern side tables at Winterthur (57.582.1–.2) have similar large pale ovals inlaid in mahogany (Montgomery 1966b, pp. 370–71, no. 356).

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.