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拍品专文
This Grecian couch is a monumental expression of American classical design. Its sweeping arms, balanced by the opposing curves of the saber legs, enclose a frame almost eight feet in length, each surface painted or upholstered in vibrant tones of red and yellow. Decorated fully in the round, the couch was the literal centerpiece of its early nineteenth-century setting and then, as today, its visual impact was powerful. It follows a design for a “sofa” by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), the first professional architect to work in America, and was made by the Baltimore firm of John (1777-1851) and Hugh (1781-1831) Finlay; all excelled at their craft and together, represent some of the most innovative talents working in the young Republic. With its painted surfaces largely intact and recently consolidated, its original caning and some of its original upholstery, the form is a remarkable survival and provides rare evidence of these practices.
Latrobe’s authorship of the design is documented by two commissions: a surviving couch made for William and Mary (Wilcocks) Waln in 1808 and a suite known by detailed drawings for President and Dolley Madison the following year. Part of a suite of over twenty-one pieces made in Philadelphia, the Waln couch (fig. 3) was without precedent in America and was a bold manifestation of the newest fashions from Europe. It was a close rendition of plate XXVIII from Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture described by the designer as “side and end of a couch, shaped like the ancient Triclinia,” a reference to the assemblage of three couches in Roman dining rooms (Gregory R. Weidman, “The Painted Furniture of John and Hugh Finlay,” The Magazine Antiques (May 1993), pp. 750-51; lacking a back, the form seen here is technically a “couch” but was termed a “sofa” by Latrobe; for more on the nomenclature of the form, see Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and Peggy A. Olley, Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (Philadelphia, 2016), pp. 121-22). For the Madisons, Latrobe conceived of a similar suite, but with more conservative turned legs rather than the saber legs seen on the Waln example and the couch offered here (fig. 1). The Madisons’ suite furnished the oval drawing room (now the Blue Room), the primary entertaining space in the White House, only to be destroyed five years later when the structure was burned by the British during the War of 1812 (for more on these suites, see Kirtley and Olley, passim and Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, “Contriving the Madisons’ Drawing Room: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Furniture of John and Hugh Finlay,” The Magazine Antiques (December 2009), pp. 56-63).
Both the Waln couch and the Madison design show the same dramatic curvature of the S-shaped arms seen on the couch offered here, a consistency achieved largely through Latrobe’s careful oversight of the production of each form. Through drawings and physical inspection, Latrobe is documented to have been heavily involved in the making of the chairs and side table from the Waln suite while they were at the shop of cabinetmaker John Aitken (d. 1839) and he undoubtedly did the same for the couch (Kirtley and Olley, p. 71). For the Madisons’ suite, Latrobe provided the Finlay firm with drawings that resemble architectural blueprints (fig. 1). The level of detail reflects the architect’s concerns that his ideas were not being property executed. As he wrote to Dolley Madison in September 1809, “I had to design, and even lay out in the frame the whole of the furniture of your drawing room …Workmen require constant watching in the commencement of work which is new to them. They must be taught like Children” (cited in Kirtley 2009, p. 61). In the designs, the forms are shown at a variety of angles, each with an array of measurements. Those for the couch dictate not only the height and width of each component, but lay out a template for the exact shape of the scroll of each arm. A comparison with the design and measurements seen in fig. 1 with the couch offered here indicates that, aside from the legs, the Finlay shop replicated the form made for the Madisons to a tee. Similarly, the construction of the arms, frame and legs follows the techniques seen on the Waln couch and Latrobe undoubtedly served as the intermediary who instructed the Finlays (for the Waln couch, see Kirtley and Olley, pp. 117-18).
With a reputation for stylish furnishings and close proximity to Washington D.C., the Finlay firm was a logical choice for the maker of the Madisons’ suite. In March 1809, Baltimorean Lt. Col. Samuel Smith (1752-1839) had provided an endorsement to Dolley Madison, noting that “Mr. Findlay” was “our man of taste” (Samuel Smith to Dolley Payne Madison, March 10, 1809, cited in Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families (New York, 2000), p. 40). As described by Alexandra Kirtley, the Madison commission was a “watershed” moment for the Finlays. Thereafter, their products were imbued with a heightened reference to motifs from Greek art, some recently discovered through archaeological digs, and embraced bolder designs with a contrasting color palette (Kirtley 2009, p. 62). The couch offered here embodies this new aesthetic. It was most likely made in the years following the Madison commission and around the time the firm made a suite of furniture for Alexander Brown (1764-1834), founder of America’s oldest investment banking firm. While the couch from the Brown suite lacks the dramatic S-shaped arms, it features identical designs of fanciful spears and the thunderbolt emblem of Jupiter seen on the couch offered here (Maryland Center for History and Culture, acc. no. 1992.8.1; see Gregory R. Weidman, “The Furniture of Classical Maryland,” in Classical Maryland, 1815-1845 (Baltimore, 1993), p. 92, no. fig. 114 and Kirtley 2009, fig. 12). These motifs are directly copied from the published works of Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, the designers largely responsible for shaping France’s Empire style. Along each long seat rail is a sheathed sword over a spear, a device derived from their design for a bed with surrounding décor referencing the hunt (fig. 4) and the winged thunderbolts appear repeatedly throughout their engraved plates (Weidman 1993 (The Magazine Antiques), pp. 750-51).
Furthermore, this couch bears the same red and yellow palette of the Brown couch, albeit in reverse, with a red ground on the long rails flanked by yellow panels. The same color combination adorns a set of chairs made for Richard Ragan (1773-1846) of Hagerstown, Maryland and documented in his accounts to the Finlay shop in November 1815. Likely made from chrome yellow, the yellow pigment was favored by the Finlays after the mineral was discovered locally in 1812 and in addition to the Brown and Ragan commissions, featured prominently in their furniture made for Thomas Tenant (c.1767-1836) and James Wilson (1775-1851), as well as a set of chairs later owned in the Abell family (see Lance Humphries, “New Furniture for Emerging Social Refinement: Colonel Thomas Tenant’s Finlay Suite Identified,” American Furniture 2024, edited by Martha H. Willoughby (Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, 2025), pp. 150-53). The paintwork was complemented by the upholstery, as seen on the original red-moreen panels with an impressed foliate design on the exterior of the arms.
The couch has long furnished Rose Hill, an eighteenth-century estate near Port Royal in Virginia’s Rappahannock Valley and has a history in the Bernard-Robb family who lived in the house until the late twentieth century. Documented in the hall in the early twentieth century (fig. 2), the couch may have been brought to the house soon after it was made in the mid 1810s. John Hipkins Bernard (1792-1858) inherited the estate in the early 1800s and upon his marriage to Jane Gay Robertson (1795-1852) in 1816, renamed the house Gay Mont in honor of his new bride. He was also ordering goods from Baltimore at this time, as indicated by an unspecified shipment of “Articles from Baltimore” in his accounts on November 2, 1816 (Bernard-Robb Papers, Mss. 65 R54, Box 2, Folder 1, cited in Tara Gleason Chicirda, “The Bowie Brothers of Port Royal, Virginia and the Bernard Family Marble Chess Table,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, vols. 42-43 (2020⁄2021), n. 28). If the couch was brought to Gay Mont at this time, it was probably one of the three “sofas” appraised together at forty-five dollars in the 1859 inventory of his estate (Ibid.). However, the lack of any matching furniture in the house suggests that the couch, which was almost certainly originally part of a larger suite, arrived at Gay Mont after the suite had been dispersed. During the nineteenth century, the family had numerous ties to Baltimore and two of Jane’s siblings married into the Skipwith family, relations of Humberston Skipwith (1791-1863) of Prestwould Plantation, a known patron of the Finlay firm.
Since its known presence at Gay Mont in the early twentieth century, the couch has remained in the house, and only removed for its conservation in 2010 and the current sale. Its ownership has paralleled that of Gay Mont during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and was part of the gift by the last family owners, who retained a life tenancy, to Preservation Virginia in 1975. In 2007, the current owners purchased the estate, restored it to its early nineteenth-century appearance, and reinstated its Rose Hill name (Mitchell Owens, “The History of the 18th-Century Plantation Rose Hill” and Julia Reed, “American Revival,” Architectural Digest, June 2013 and March 2017).
Latrobe’s authorship of the design is documented by two commissions: a surviving couch made for William and Mary (Wilcocks) Waln in 1808 and a suite known by detailed drawings for President and Dolley Madison the following year. Part of a suite of over twenty-one pieces made in Philadelphia, the Waln couch (fig. 3) was without precedent in America and was a bold manifestation of the newest fashions from Europe. It was a close rendition of plate XXVIII from Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture described by the designer as “side and end of a couch, shaped like the ancient Triclinia,” a reference to the assemblage of three couches in Roman dining rooms (Gregory R. Weidman, “The Painted Furniture of John and Hugh Finlay,” The Magazine Antiques (May 1993), pp. 750-51; lacking a back, the form seen here is technically a “couch” but was termed a “sofa” by Latrobe; for more on the nomenclature of the form, see Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and Peggy A. Olley, Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (Philadelphia, 2016), pp. 121-22). For the Madisons, Latrobe conceived of a similar suite, but with more conservative turned legs rather than the saber legs seen on the Waln example and the couch offered here (fig. 1). The Madisons’ suite furnished the oval drawing room (now the Blue Room), the primary entertaining space in the White House, only to be destroyed five years later when the structure was burned by the British during the War of 1812 (for more on these suites, see Kirtley and Olley, passim and Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, “Contriving the Madisons’ Drawing Room: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Furniture of John and Hugh Finlay,” The Magazine Antiques (December 2009), pp. 56-63).
Both the Waln couch and the Madison design show the same dramatic curvature of the S-shaped arms seen on the couch offered here, a consistency achieved largely through Latrobe’s careful oversight of the production of each form. Through drawings and physical inspection, Latrobe is documented to have been heavily involved in the making of the chairs and side table from the Waln suite while they were at the shop of cabinetmaker John Aitken (d. 1839) and he undoubtedly did the same for the couch (Kirtley and Olley, p. 71). For the Madisons’ suite, Latrobe provided the Finlay firm with drawings that resemble architectural blueprints (fig. 1). The level of detail reflects the architect’s concerns that his ideas were not being property executed. As he wrote to Dolley Madison in September 1809, “I had to design, and even lay out in the frame the whole of the furniture of your drawing room …Workmen require constant watching in the commencement of work which is new to them. They must be taught like Children” (cited in Kirtley 2009, p. 61). In the designs, the forms are shown at a variety of angles, each with an array of measurements. Those for the couch dictate not only the height and width of each component, but lay out a template for the exact shape of the scroll of each arm. A comparison with the design and measurements seen in fig. 1 with the couch offered here indicates that, aside from the legs, the Finlay shop replicated the form made for the Madisons to a tee. Similarly, the construction of the arms, frame and legs follows the techniques seen on the Waln couch and Latrobe undoubtedly served as the intermediary who instructed the Finlays (for the Waln couch, see Kirtley and Olley, pp. 117-18).
With a reputation for stylish furnishings and close proximity to Washington D.C., the Finlay firm was a logical choice for the maker of the Madisons’ suite. In March 1809, Baltimorean Lt. Col. Samuel Smith (1752-1839) had provided an endorsement to Dolley Madison, noting that “Mr. Findlay” was “our man of taste” (Samuel Smith to Dolley Payne Madison, March 10, 1809, cited in Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families (New York, 2000), p. 40). As described by Alexandra Kirtley, the Madison commission was a “watershed” moment for the Finlays. Thereafter, their products were imbued with a heightened reference to motifs from Greek art, some recently discovered through archaeological digs, and embraced bolder designs with a contrasting color palette (Kirtley 2009, p. 62). The couch offered here embodies this new aesthetic. It was most likely made in the years following the Madison commission and around the time the firm made a suite of furniture for Alexander Brown (1764-1834), founder of America’s oldest investment banking firm. While the couch from the Brown suite lacks the dramatic S-shaped arms, it features identical designs of fanciful spears and the thunderbolt emblem of Jupiter seen on the couch offered here (Maryland Center for History and Culture, acc. no. 1992.8.1; see Gregory R. Weidman, “The Furniture of Classical Maryland,” in Classical Maryland, 1815-1845 (Baltimore, 1993), p. 92, no. fig. 114 and Kirtley 2009, fig. 12). These motifs are directly copied from the published works of Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, the designers largely responsible for shaping France’s Empire style. Along each long seat rail is a sheathed sword over a spear, a device derived from their design for a bed with surrounding décor referencing the hunt (fig. 4) and the winged thunderbolts appear repeatedly throughout their engraved plates (Weidman 1993 (The Magazine Antiques), pp. 750-51).
Furthermore, this couch bears the same red and yellow palette of the Brown couch, albeit in reverse, with a red ground on the long rails flanked by yellow panels. The same color combination adorns a set of chairs made for Richard Ragan (1773-1846) of Hagerstown, Maryland and documented in his accounts to the Finlay shop in November 1815. Likely made from chrome yellow, the yellow pigment was favored by the Finlays after the mineral was discovered locally in 1812 and in addition to the Brown and Ragan commissions, featured prominently in their furniture made for Thomas Tenant (c.1767-1836) and James Wilson (1775-1851), as well as a set of chairs later owned in the Abell family (see Lance Humphries, “New Furniture for Emerging Social Refinement: Colonel Thomas Tenant’s Finlay Suite Identified,” American Furniture 2024, edited by Martha H. Willoughby (Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, 2025), pp. 150-53). The paintwork was complemented by the upholstery, as seen on the original red-moreen panels with an impressed foliate design on the exterior of the arms.
The couch has long furnished Rose Hill, an eighteenth-century estate near Port Royal in Virginia’s Rappahannock Valley and has a history in the Bernard-Robb family who lived in the house until the late twentieth century. Documented in the hall in the early twentieth century (fig. 2), the couch may have been brought to the house soon after it was made in the mid 1810s. John Hipkins Bernard (1792-1858) inherited the estate in the early 1800s and upon his marriage to Jane Gay Robertson (1795-1852) in 1816, renamed the house Gay Mont in honor of his new bride. He was also ordering goods from Baltimore at this time, as indicated by an unspecified shipment of “Articles from Baltimore” in his accounts on November 2, 1816 (Bernard-Robb Papers, Mss. 65 R54, Box 2, Folder 1, cited in Tara Gleason Chicirda, “The Bowie Brothers of Port Royal, Virginia and the Bernard Family Marble Chess Table,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, vols. 42-43 (2020⁄2021), n. 28). If the couch was brought to Gay Mont at this time, it was probably one of the three “sofas” appraised together at forty-five dollars in the 1859 inventory of his estate (Ibid.). However, the lack of any matching furniture in the house suggests that the couch, which was almost certainly originally part of a larger suite, arrived at Gay Mont after the suite had been dispersed. During the nineteenth century, the family had numerous ties to Baltimore and two of Jane’s siblings married into the Skipwith family, relations of Humberston Skipwith (1791-1863) of Prestwould Plantation, a known patron of the Finlay firm.
Since its known presence at Gay Mont in the early twentieth century, the couch has remained in the house, and only removed for its conservation in 2010 and the current sale. Its ownership has paralleled that of Gay Mont during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and was part of the gift by the last family owners, who retained a life tenancy, to Preservation Virginia in 1975. In 2007, the current owners purchased the estate, restored it to its early nineteenth-century appearance, and reinstated its Rose Hill name (Mitchell Owens, “The History of the 18th-Century Plantation Rose Hill” and Julia Reed, “American Revival,” Architectural Digest, June 2013 and March 2017).