French furniture in Boston. (Current and Coming).(Boston Museum of Fine Arts' conservation, exhibit of French furniture suite)

James Swan, a self-made Scottish immigrant who arrived in Boston around 1765, began as an apprentice in a countinghouse and became a man of international reputation with a sizeable fortune. He accomplished this metamorphosis in two ways: first he married Hepzibah Clarke, a wealthy Bostonian, and second, through his military and political forays, he established friendships with important Frenchmen during the American Revolution. Through these alliances he launched a brilliant and profitable career supplying provisions to the French military during the war between France and Austria in the 1790s. Large quantities of royal possessions, which before the French Revolution embellished royal chateaux such as Marly, Versailles, Saint-Cloud, and Fontainebleau, were confiscated and sold at auction or bartered for much needed military supplies beginning in 1792. Swan acquired more than a few of these sumptuous objects, which he subsequently dispatched to his house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where his wife cultivated her taste for things French. Among the objects that descended through the families of the Swans' three daughters are a pair of Sevres porcelain vases, a pair of gilt-bronze andirons, and a suite of ten pieces of furniture, which comprises a bed, two fauteuils, four side chairs, a bergere, a prie-dieu, and a fire screen.

The suite was given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, piecemeal between 1921 and 1979. Since it had been split up between heirs by the 1970s, each piece had undergone different degrees of restoration. Recently the museum has completed an exhaustive study of each object in the suite and has had each conserved to museum standards. To accomplish this, the furniture was sent first to the fine conservation laboratories at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and then to Paris. The suite is being installed in a new gallery devoted to French decorative arts at the museum, which opens on October 9. The story of the complex four-year conservation process appears in Design notes on page 176 of this issue.

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