Armoire

While the populace of other American cities enjoyed storing their clothes and textiles in chests of drawers, double chests, and clothes presses, the inhabitants of New Orleans and other lower Mississippi River cities like Natchez chose to use a storage form derived from French armoires. The form arrived in Louisiana with French immigrants and in the minds of French and Caribbean cabinetmakers. Louisiana armoires followed the overall French form with their large double doors and integral central stile, interior belt of drawers, short cabriole legs, and large fiche hinges. Around the beginning of the 19th century with the integration of non-French artisans into New Orleans, some cabinetmakers began to decorate their wares in an Anglo-American fashion. This armoire, which was purchased from a local (but unknown) Natchez family by the dealer who handled it in the 1970s, is ornamented over its entire front with neoclassical inlays of ovals, swags, bellflowers, bowknots, and a vine with berries emanating from a classical snake-handled vase. Aspects of this type of inlay and veneer work can be seen from New England to Maryland to western Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. This armoire and others like it represent the melding of a French storage form with Anglo-American decoration. While this type of integration is also seen in the furniture of other cultures arriving in America, the history of Louisiana and its strong French orientation makes this an especially interesting and important form to have in the Colonial Williamsburg collection. There are no other pieces of furniture from Louisiana in the CW collection, but like the recently acquired Kentucky chest of drawers, this armoire demonstrates how important the early furniture of the Mississippi River Valley is to the history of America's furniture trade.
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