H. Parrott Bacot, Jr.
Saturday, March 16, 2002
9:15 - 10:45
Early Louisiana Furniture: The Acculturation Process, 1735 - 1835
Location: Room 309, Simons Center for the Arts

Biography: H. Parrott Bacot, Jr. is Professor of the History of Art at Louisiana State University. He received his MA from the State University of New York (SUNY) and his BA from Baylor University. Mr. Bacot has been the recipient of an American Friends of Attingham Scholarship for study at the National Trust Summer School on the Historic Houses of England and a Scriven Foundation Fellowship to the Cooperstown Graduate Programs at SUNY. He has been the Executive Director of the Louisiana State University Museum Complex as well as Curator of the Anglo-American Art Museum(now the LSU Museum of Art). Mr. Bacot has extensive experience as a lecturer, having presented material for gatherings such as the Colonial Williamsburg Antiques Forum, the National Trust for Historic Preservation convention, the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Baton Rouge Art League, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, where he inaugurated the Distinguished Lecture Series. Mr. Bacot’s publications include a book, Nineteenth Century Lighting, Candle-Powered Devices: 1783-1883, and articles such as “Nineteenth-Century Silver in Natchez” and “Mistletoe Plantation House in Natchez, Mississippi” in The Magazine Antiques. He is co-author of a book about plantations which is to be published in March of 2002.

Synopsis: Louisiana as both colony and state has been blessed with a wealth of woods suitable for cabinetmaking - walnut, cherry, red mulberry, cypress, and yellow pine. AS part of the Caribbean world, magnificent mahoganies were also readily available. Louisiana is also cursed with a semi-tropical climate with attendant long torrid summers and high humidity. The weather will, therefore, affect the design of several furniture forms.

Culturally, Louisiana is a potpourri with initial French settlers providing the dominant influence in the period of this paper’s concern. The Spanish did rule Louisiana from 1768 to 1803 and add their own cultural veneer to the colony. With the English Industrial Revolution and the American War for Independence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Anglo-American influences enter the region both legally and illegally. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the flood gates are opened to the styles coming from the seaboard states. Free people of color play an important role in early Louisiana cabinetmaking.

By the opening of the nineteenth century, both the architecture and furniture designed have coalesced into a creole stye unique to the region. In furniture the movement is from purely French forms and decorations to the use of French rococo forms blended with Anglo-American style carving, inlay, and hardware in the Federal taste. The evolution culminates with the early Grecian style as practiced in Louisiana. This style blends aspects of the French Empire with Anglo-American designs and employs rich mahogany and flashy mahogany veneers in rectilinear furniture.

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