By the middle of the nineteenth century, the fashionable American parlor was furnished en suite with a large parlor set, such as this example. The furniture arrangement was anchored by a center table placed in the middle of the room. The étagère, a new furniture form, provided a means to exhibit precious items that revealed the family’s taste and interests. What today is called the Rococo Revival, often referred to as the French taste, was considered the appropriate style for the parlor. Cabriole legs and floral and scrolled ornament of the eighteenth-century Rococo were adopted and reinterpreted in the new style. The furniture of John Henry Belter is interesting in the history and development of furniture making in that it combines both the handwork traditions of the past and the use of lamination and steam pressure that look to the future. Belter, one of the hundreds of immigrant Germans working in the New York furniture trade at the mid-nineteenth century, attained fame in his time as the inventor of a patented process by which laminated layers of wood, under steam pressure, could be shaped in molds to provide strong, curving backs for his intricately carved and pierced Rococo Revival-style furniture. Indeed, the name Belter became synonymous with this style of mid-nineteenth-century parlor and bedroom furniture. While several individual documented pieces from Belter’s prolific factory survive, this set is unique in that it is still together with its original bill of sale. It shows that Elizabeth Taylor Sanford Jordan of Milledgeville, Georgia, purchased the set for about $1,300 in 1855. She was married to Green Hill Jordan. Sadly, she did not have much time to enjoy the set, as she died three years later. Her brother-in-law, Benjamin, bought a very similar set for his family. He had married Emily, a sister of Elizabeth, and, according to family tradition, the two households had furnished their homes almost identically. The two parlor sets were originally upholstered in brocade—blue-green for the Green Jordan set and pink-red for the Emily and Benjamin Jordan set.

Technical notes: B.81.9.9: Rosewood, rosewood veneer; ash (comer block), black walnut (rail under corner top); B.81.9.10: Rosewood, rosewood veneer; black walnut (right panel of mirror back), mahogany (horizontal board of bottom shelf), eastern white pine (base backboard), yellow-poplar (panel over left back side), and an undetermined exotic wood, possibly eucalyptus (inner stile of right back panel frame, rear horizontal rail at bottom of upper assembly).

Related examples: Belter called this furniture “Arabasket.” Whether that term refers solely to this pattern or, as has been suggested, was used to describe all pierced, carved furniture is not entirely clear (see Tracy et al. 1970, no. 126). Other examples in this pattern are in Schwartz, Stanek, and True 1981: an armchair, p. 47, no. 12; a sofa, p. 63, no. 37; and a parlor set with busts on the crest rail, relating in concept to the busts on the skirt of the center table, p. 49.

Adapted from 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.