As the nineteenth century progressed, window treatment became more and more elaborate, utilizing yards and yards of fabric in multiple layers. By midcentury, the voluminous drapes were “finished by heavy cornices and the richest corresponding decorations.” Such cornices were closely related to the pier and mantel mirrors that were essential to fashionable parlor decor, in either the Rococo Revival style, as in the Bayou Bend example, or the Renaissance Revival style. These cornices employ the same vocabulary of ornament—central leaf-and-scroll cartouche, flanking scrolls, and corner scroll-bordered reserves—and techniques of manufacture as did contemporaneous mirror and picture frames. It is likely they were made in a shop that specialized in those wares.

Related examples: Very similar deep cornices are part of the 1853 furnishings of the parlor at Lansdowne in Natchez, Mississippi. In a departure, while the furniture of this room is in the Rococo taste, the pier and mantle mirrors are in the Renaissance taste (Miller and Miller 1986, p. 60). Other examples: a deep triple example in the bay window of the parlor at Stanton Hall, Natchez, built 1850–58 (Garrett 1993, p. 95): an illustration in Godey’s Lady’s Book, February 1854 (Grier 1988. p. 33, fig. 8). 

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.