By the end of this year, if the stars are correctly aligned, a huge tome will be published by the Historic New Orleans Collection. Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735–1835 will be six hundred pages long, complete with footnotes, bibliography and glossary—not to mention a thousand illustrations.
Encompassing the distinctive styles of furniture that emerged in Louisiana and the Mississippi River valley by the early nineteenth century, the book will weigh more than eight pounds, making it the largest book ever published by HNOC.
The primary authors are Jack Holden and H. Parrott Bacot, better known as Pat. Sitting in his living room in south Baton Rouge, Bacot talks about a project that has absorbed him for twenty-one years. From time to time, he leaps up to demonstrate hinges and escutcheons on armoires he and his wife Barbara have collected.
A native of Shreveport, Bacot studied art history, museology, and folk art at LSU and the State University of New York. He went on to become director of the Anglo-American Art Museum, then located in the LSU Campanile. He also taught art history at LSU for forty years, retiring in 2008.
In his thirty-three years as director, Bacot substantially increased the collections of the museum, now known as the LSU Museum of Art and located in the Shaw Center downtown.
“We had the largest collection of New Orleans–made silver in public hands,” says Bacot, who also assembled impressive collections of paintings by French-Louisiana artist Adrien Persac and of Newcomb arts and crafts.
He also purchased Louisiana-made furniture. “It is a modest collection, but every piece is a choice example,” says Bacot, who credits Holden with helping him create the collection.
“Jack helped raise the money to buy Louisiana materials,” says Bacot of Holden, a physician who, with his wife Pat, collects Louisiana art and furniture. (Several of their pieces will appear in the book.)
Over the years, Bacot and Holden lamented the paucity of information on their shared passion. “We’d say, ‘Isn’t it a shame we don’t have a book on early Louisiana furniture?’” says Bacot. “We realized if anybody was going to do it, we were. The State Museum wasn’t collecting the materials, and neither was the New Orleans Museum of Art. Nobody was interested in doing this, so Jack and I decided to do it.”
In addition to exhibition catalogues, Bacot has written a book on nineteenth-century lighting devices. He has also collaborated with other local scholars on studies of Persac, artist Joseph Paret, and nineteenth-century silver.
Bacot frequently called on LSU photographer Jim Zietz to shoot objects for museum catalogues. Zietz also made photos to illustrate Bacot’s articles for The Magazine Antiques, for which he has written since 1970.
Bacot and Holden had Zietz do all the photography for the book they envisioned as the definitive study of Louisiana furniture. Despite having no publishing contract in hand, they gathered information for years. Bacot tapped donors for funds to pay Zietz, who had to work around his day job.
“We worked nights, weekends, in the heat, in the cold,” Bacot recalls. “Jim is not only talented but so amenable. He was so anxious to fulfill our vision of what the materials should look like.”
In 2003, the project took a quantum leap forward when Bacot and Holden, armed with a sheaf of Zietz’s photos, met with the board of directors of HNOC. The board, which had recently published the gigantic map book Charting Lousiana, had reservations about undertaking another massive project but ultimately agreed that a scholarly work on Louisiana furniture deserved to be published.
HNOC put up money for the project but also expected the authors to raise funds. Bacot scored a coup by securing a large grant from the Coypu Foundation, an organization founded by the estate of the late John S. McIlhenney. Other collectors and fans of Louisiana furniture made donations, some substantial.
With publication assured, the team went into high gear. Realizing that they couldn’t cover all aspects of the subject themselves, Holden and Bacot brought in additional authors. Art historian Cybèle Gontar wrote chapters on Campeche chairs and imported furniture, and decorative-arts historian Francis Puig wrote a chapter on the furniture of the upper Mississippi River valley. Pointe Coupée Parish historian Brian Costello contributed an examination of furniture inventories from successions throughout the state.
Bacot and Holden made dozens of forays to check out furniture. If a piece passed muster, they followed up with a photo expedition. “It was a bit more complicated than just showing up with a Brownie camera,” quips Bacot.
They hauled 150 pounds of equipment to every shoot: huge rolls of background paper (107 inches wide by 36 feet long), a stand to hang the paper from, four strobe lights, power packs for the lights, extension cords, and three-prong adaptors for houses with ancient electrical systems.
Zietz would select the best room in the house for photo purposes. Then he and Bacot (or Holden) would empty the room of its furniture, set up the background paper, and lift the featured piece onto the paper, taking care not to scratch either the furniture or the paper.
“We moved things gingerly,” says Bacot, noting that larger armoires weighed 250 to 300 pounds, with one brute estimated at 450. Before being moved, an armoire would be emptied of its contents. Then the team would remove the doors, drawers, and shelves and carefully hoist the piece onto the background paper. “We had help with some of it, but usually it was just me, Jim, and Jack moving the stuff around,” says Bacot.
“What made this project difficult was that this furniture is privately owned,” says Bacot, noting that pieces were found all over Louisiana, as well as in Missouri, Illinois, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, and North and South Carolina.
“People let us come in and tear up their houses,” he says. “We rolled back rugs, moved pictures, set up lights and transformers. We’ve blown fuses and tripped breakers. People have been very patient with us.”
In the midst of the chaos, Bacot and Holden did fieldwork, measuring each piece, examining it closely, and making notes on salient details. “Some of the book got written on the spot,” says Bacot. “We would do the descriptions on site, then write them up more formally later on.”
He marvels at what he calls “the serendipity of this whole project. One piece led to another, one collector led to another. Once word was out, we got calls from people who had pieces they wanted us to come look at.
“We cover not just Creole but Acadian,” says Bacot. “We have examples from the early settlements of both south and north Louisiana—every place that was settled in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We’re stopping at 1835 deliberately. We wanted only hand-made furniture.
“We’re starting in 1735, with some tables made for the Ursuline Convent. One table, from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Judice, is thirteen feet long, with a top made from one walnut board. It may have come out of the very first convent, which was built in the French Quarter about 1735.
“The nuns brought their own furniture to the convent as a dowry,” he notes. “They were ladies of quality. The Ursulines had an unsurpassed collection of cabriole-leg tables.
“If you collect Louisiana stuff you have to be a little bit more forgiving about repairs,” notes Bacot. “People had large families, so the furniture got banged up. God knows how much has been lost to hurricanes, floods, and fires. That’s why so little of the eighteenth-century stuff is left.” In fact, two pieces documented in the book later fell victim to fire: an armoire that burned along with Laura Plantation in 2004 and a chest consumed by the flames that destroyed the Kate Chopin House in Cloutierville in 2008.
The process of discovery kept the work interesting. Experts had long believed that the hardware was made in France, but Bacot discovered that most of the brass hardware on armoires was probably ordered from England. At the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, he found English catalogues illustrating the exact hardware used on Louisiana armoires.
“We found a fiche labeled ‘French hinge,’” he says. “The English made them in the French taste. The discovery of Anglo-made hardware was one of our defining moments.”
As a preview to the book, all the authors, plus other experts, will speak at the third annual New Orleans Antiques Forum, focusing on Louisiana furniture, at HNOC August 5 through 8.
The book will be printed in Verona, Italy, and Bacot expects the color quality to be high. “The whole thing will be in color with the exception of period photos and prints,” he says. “The illustrations and captions will be the most valuable part of the book.”
HNOC plans a first print run of five thousand copies. “We hope to see it come out just before Christmas,” says Bacot. “After twenty-one years, we can finally say it’s just around the corner.”
A writer based in Baton Rouge, Ruth Laney has written for national magazines. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
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