A Louis XVI Gilt-Bronze Mounted Tulipwood, Amaranth, Stained Sycamore, Fruitwood, and Parquetry Enco

Property of a Midwestern Lady

With inset white marble top; partially re-mounted in the 19th century

height 41 in.; width 30 in.; depth 23 in.
104.1 cm.; 76.2 cm.; 58.4 cm.

Provenance

Probably acquired by Colonel James Swan (1754-1831) in Paris, with its pair
Christie's New York, 17 November 1999, lot 625 ($51,750);
Galerie Segoura, Paris

Literature

E.P. Delorme, 'James Swan's French Furniture', The Magazine Antiques, March 1975, p.452-461

Catalogue note

James Swan (1754-1830) was born in Fife, Scotland and emigrated to Boston in 1765. With revolutionary sympathies, he participated in the Boston Tea Party and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was acquainted with many of the American Founding Fathers including Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He served in the Massachusetts legislature and engaged in property speculation, which landed him in debt and led him to relocate in 1787 or 1788 to Paris, where he frequented the Marquis de Lafayette. After returning to Boston in 1795, he again left for Paris in 1798 and would spend the remainder of his life there, the last decade mainly in a debtors' prison.

During the French Revolution Swan served as an agent for the Revolutionary government to procure much needed basic foodstuffs and commodities from the United States, in partnership with the Swiss businessman Johann-Caspar Schweizer. The cash-strapped regime exchanged luxury items including furniture confiscated from the former Royal Family and aristocratic collections for essential goods, and Swan was able to acquire an important collection of French decorative arts himself, which he was able to export to Boston. Much of it remained with his descendants until the 20th century when it was bequeathed or sold to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The group includes a mahogany secretaire and commode attributed to Jean-Ferdinand Schwerdfeger that may have formed part of Marie-Antoinette's bedchamber furniture at the Petit Trianon, and an important suite of giltwood seat furniture (fig.2) by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sené supplied to the Thierry Ville d'Avray, Intendant of the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne in the Place de la Concorde (now the Hôtel de la Marine).

At some point this corner cabinet was separated from its pair, which was first recorded as belonging to Swan when published in an edition of the memoirs of Richard Codman, a member of a prominent Boston family and contemporary of Swan who also lived an worked in France in the 1790s (R. Codman, Reminiscences, Boston 1923). This encoignure was lent to the exhibition Lafayette, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 3 December 1975 - 12 March 1976, and later sold Sotheby's New York, 4 November 1989, lot 295 and Christie's 8 October 2013, lot 571.