While originally thought to be window cornices, these are more likely valances for venetian blinds, judging from related extant examples that remain with their blind sets. The naive, fanciful landscapes of the central panels depict a stone windmill, a Gothic church, a Gothic bridge, an octagonal garden folly, and houses on two, suggesting that the painter’s inspiration came from prints.

Related examples: A virtually identical example is in the Bybee Collection, Dallas Museum of Art. Similar valance boards, painted cream rather than green, were found in the attic of the Pettus Home in Woodville, Mississippi, and were installed at Rosemont Plantation, Woodville. Another set in Murfeesboro, Tennessee, has been documented in MESDA’s survey of southern decorative arts (letters in object files, Bayou Bend). Other examples are illustrated in Waring 1968, fig. 153; Christie’s, New York, June 4, 1988, sale 6622, lot III; Sotheby’s, New York, October 26, 1991, sale 6627, lot III; Northeast Auctions, Manchester, New Hampshire, May 23–24,1992, lots 400,401; and Antiques and The Arts Weekly, October 6,1995, p. 134E.

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.