The painted furniture of Philadelphia: a reappraisal.

Philadelphia was the capital of the United States until 1800, and in the late eighteenth century it was a thriving city with a bustling port, an active intellectual community, and a booming market for manufactured wares. A taste in Philadelphia for high-style painted furniture and the community of decorative painters who produced it there have been overshadowed by the prolific fancy furniture from nearby Baltimore. However, recent discoveries have begun to document Philadelphia's painted furniture, shedding new light on old conundrums.

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It is well known that the windsor furniture industry flourished in Philadelphia. In the late eighteenth century, the painters who worked in that trade, as well as landscape painters, gilders, and interior, sign, coach, window blind, floorcloth, and other decorative painters, collaborated with traditional furniture makers to create more formal painted furniture. For example, in 1796 Edward Johnson (w. c. 1794-1796), a cabinetmaker "late from Philadelphia," advertised in Charleston that he had for sale "a variety of Chairs of newest patterns ... Two suits of Tables, superbly finished for a Drawing-Room, Beautiful Japanned Chairs, or painted for d[degrees] [drawing rooms], or bed chambers." (1) That the japanned, or painted, chairs were designated for drawing rooms suggests that they were more stylish than windsors.

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In the early 1770s a taste for painted decoration that contrasted with dark natural wood pervaded America's urban centers. Fashionable families from Boston to Charleston sought to emulate the Grecian style emerging from the furniture warerooms of England and continental Europe. At first, such furniture was imported, but Philadelphia's surfeit of talented, often European-trained decorative painters rose to the challenge of reproducing the European models.

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