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Inside Furnishing
The much-anticipated Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835, heralded in previous issues of the Quarterly, was released in December to critical and popular acclaim. Featured in the New York Times and feted at receptions in New Orleans and beyond, the book already has fulfilled its prepublication goal: to celebrate regional craftsmanship while provoking lively discussion.
The heart of Furnishing Louisiana is an expansive color catalogue illustrating and categorizing furniture crafted throughout the Mississippi River valley and other areas of Creole and Acadian settlement in the New World. The catalogued items, culled from hundreds of known survivors from the 18th and early 19th centuries, range from the humblest boucherie table to the most intricately inlaid armoire. Supplementing the catalogue are contextual chapters on woods, hardware, inlay, cabinetmakers, architecture, and trade—provocative essays that offer readers additional keys to the appreciation and interpretation of early Louisiana furniture. The following excerpt is adapted from one such essay, “Inside the Early Louisiana Home,” by Brian J. Costello.
Merieult House (Royal Street) by Jim Blanchard, 1993 (1993.38.1)
2 Volume XXVIII, Number 1 — Winter 2011
For 21 st-century scholars and connoisseurs looking to place early Louisiana furniture in a cultural context, 18th- and early 19th-century documents provide an illuminating portrait of the region’s homes and lifestyles. Particularly informative are judicial inventories—court-ordered itemizations of movable and immovable (i.e., real estate) property, usually conducted in the course of proceedings such as successions, suits for separation and divorce, and writs for seizure and sale.
Local courts oversaw the inventorying of property within their jurisdictions. An officer of the court applied paper and/or wax seals to the doors and drawers of furniture assumed to contain valuables. He then sealed the doors and windows of the building and appointed a guardian to assure that the premises were not disturbed. Once the inventory began, an officer broke or removed all seals to allow other court appointees to view the movables and estimate their value. Finally, the court recorded the proceedings, resulting in a descriptive list of assets. Documentation of inventory proceedings can be found in numerous repositories throughout Louisiana, including the clerk of court’s office of each parish, the Louisiana State Museum, the Louisiana State Archives, the New Orleans Notarial Archives, the City Archives division of the New Orleans Public Library, and The Historic New Orleans Collection.
The pattern of changing styles in home appointments follows the arc of cultural and economic change in the region. Large-scale sugar and cotton production resulted in a rise in affluence and an increase in comfort in the growing city of New Orleans and on the flourishing plantations to the north. A distinct evolution in taste becomes apparent: a gradual shift away from Creole and Acadian roots and toward an increasingly dominant