The Renaissance Revival in Mississippi: Examining Furniture at Belfast and Lansdowne

by Steven Baltsas   

A Research Grant from the Decorative Arts Trust allowed me to experience the Mississippi River Valley and study furniture there in the Renaissance Revival style, the subject of my master’s thesis. My research seeks to understand how French and German makers and retailers of furniture in U.S. coastal cities engaged with Romantic nationalism in their sale of Renaissance Revival furniture between 1845–61. I argue that elite white patrons used these objects to visualize their ideas about class, ancestral pedigree, and racial capitalism in a period when the United States sought to define its own national culture.

During my trip, I investigated the homes of cotton planters in Natchez, MS, where I was hosted by the Historic Natchez Foundation. With access to the Foundation’s probate document collection, I considered Irish-born cotton broker Frederick Stanton. From 1856–58, Stanton erected a monumental house, Belfast, and hired German-born Henry N. Siebrecht of New Orleans to provide furnishings. When Stanton died in January 1859, Siebrecht had not been paid for some of the furniture procured for Belfast. Probate papers revealed that Stanton’s estate also incurred fees for the capture of Charles and King, enslaved men who had self-emancipated to Texas months after their enslaver’s death. Documents referencing Stanton’s Louisiana plantations remind us how he financed Belfast’s decoration. The mansion’s total expense demonstrated his mastery to the surging international cotton industry.

I examined the oak Renaissance style furniture for the library at Belfast (now known as Stanton Hall) thanks to the Pilgrimage Garden Club: six carved side chairs (figures 1 and 2) and a bookcase (figure 3). The library’s design represents Siebrecht’s attempt to create a defined space within the mansion to embolden his client’s race and masculinity. Its furnishings alluding to a glorified European past, Stanton probably intended the library to serve as a command center for his plantations in nearby Tensas Parish, LA.

For a comparison to the Stanton objects, I visited Lansdowne (c. 1852–53), a plantation house built for George and Charlotte Marshall just outside Natchez. Likely furnished with Siebrecht’s assistance, the hall retains oak seating furniture, a table, and bookcase of similar dimensions to that ordered by Stanton, all in the Renaissance Revival taste. I also viewed a fragment of French wallpaper from the 1850s hall that depicts bundles of hunting gear (figure 4), relating it to the carved hounds’ heads found on the armchairs (figure 5). Allusions to “the chase” were essential to French Renaissance visual culture and Southern manhood. Aside from their use in recreational hunting, dogs also tracked self-emancipating individuals. A similarly vicious chase for capital drove Northerners like Charlotte’s father, David Hunt, to become the earliest English-speaking cotton planters in the region.

Through close-looking of the Stanton and Marshall furnishings, I now have enough data to compare construction and carving techniques against Renaissance Revival wares attributed to Northern manufacturers. Interaction with the Natchez furniture also allowed me to understand how the objects operated in space. Intended to reproduce the visuality of 16th- and 17th-century European furniture, the revival style pieces have themselves become antique. Situated in context, they are equally intimidating and alluring. I am equipped for further research on the circulation and significance of Renaissance style furniture traveling between Paris, New Orleans, and New York in the years just before the American Civil War.

Steven Baltsas is a Lois F. McNeil Fellow in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware. Learn more about his research in the Bulletin post about his recent lecture at the Delaware Antiques Show.