1. Edward Porter Alexander, ed., The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710–1719 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), p. 115. These issues are explored in Richard Archer, “New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 4 (October 1990): 477–502; and David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). For the specific localism of seventeenth-century transferral, see Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963). For the problem of pluralism and diffusion in seventeenth-century New England material culture, see Robert Blair St. George, The Wrought Covenant: Source Material for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England, 1620–1700 (Brockton, Mass.: Brockton Art Center/Fuller Memorial, 1979); and Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982), esp. vol. 1, Migration and Settlement. The single dissenting voice in recent historiography comes from David Hackett Fischer, who maintains the primacy of East Anglian “hearth culture” in colonial New England in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 13–205. Fischer’s position has been aggressively challenged by historians on both sides of the Atlantic. The issues in this debate are clearly delineated in Jack P. Greene, Virginia De John Anderson, James Horn, Barry Levy, Ned C. Landsman, and David Hackett Fischer, “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America—A Symposium,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (April 1991): 224–308.

2. On pluralism in early New York, see Thomas L. Purvis, “The National Origins of New Yorkers in 1790,” New York History 67, no. 2 (April 1986): 133–50; Nan A. Rothschild, New York City Neighborhoods: The Eighteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1990); Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); and David S. Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History 62, no. 1 (January 1981): 43–50. On woodworking artisans, pluralism, and creolization, see Neil Duff Kamil, “Of American Kasten and the Mythology of ‘Pure Dutchness’: A Review Article,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1993), pp. 275–82; Lonn Taylor and Dessa Bokides, New Mexican Furniture, 1660–1940: The Origins, Survival, and Revival of Furniture Making in the Hispanic Southwest (Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1987); and Lonn Taylor, “Hispanic Cabinetmakers and the Anglo-American Aesthetic,” Antiques 136, no. 3 (September 1989): 554–67.

3. Elizabeth Paling Funk, “Netherlands’ Popular Culture in the Knickerbocker Works of Washington Irving,” in New World Dutch Studies: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776, edited by Roderic H. Blackburn and Nancy A. Kelley (Albany, N.Y.: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1987), pp. 83–94. Kamil, “Of American Kasten,” pp. 275–82.

4. Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730: An Interpretive Catalogue (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 229–356.

5. These inventories represent nearly the total of those known to survive in English from early New York City and Queens and Kings Counties on western Long Island and in northern Brooklyn. Inventories taken in English begin in 1664. The majority of original documents are currently on deposit in the New York State Archives in Albany; Klapper Library, Queens College, Flushing, N.Y.; the New York Historical Society Library, New York, N.Y.; and the Winterthur Museum Library, Winterthur, Delaware.

6. R. W. Symonds, “The English Export Trade in Furniture to Colonial America, Part I,” Antiques 27, no. 6 (June 1935): 216. The majority of such reports to Parliament (most of which were authored by English merchants and the London guilds) appeared in the 1760s on the heels of the huge debt British taxpayers accumulated after the end of the Imperial Wars in 1763, finally prompting the ill-fated Parliamentary Reform Acts (see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789: Needs and Opportunities for Study [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985], p. 190).

7. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, pp. 92–93.

8. Ibid., pp. 96–110.

9. Richard H. Randall Jr., “Boston Chairs,” Old-Time New England 54, no. 1 (Summer 1963): 12–16; Brock Jobe, “The Boston Furniture Industry, 1720–1740,” in Boston Furniture of the Eighteenth Century, edited by Walter Muir Whitehill, Jonathan Fairbanks, and Brock Jobe (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1974), p. 40; Robert F. Trent, Hearts and Crowns: Folk Chairs of the Connecticut Coast, 1720–1840 (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1977), pp. 32–35. Six “Boston made leather chaires” are listed in the inventory of James Nappier of New York City, March 26, 1754, Joseph Downs Manuscript Collection, Winterthur Museum Library, acc. 53.190. As early as March 28, 1701, Her Majesy’s Custom’s Clerks recorded that Benjamin Faneuil of New York City was to pay duty on “12 leather chairs [lately arrived on the sloop Rachell from] Boston where the above goods were made” (An Account of Her Majesty’s Revenue in the Province of New York, 1701–1709: The Customs Records of Early Colonial New York, edited by Julius M. Block, Leo Hershkowitz, Kenneth Scott, and Constance D. Sherman [Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1966], p. 35). Timothy H. Breene, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1986): 470–99.

10. William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, Volume One: From the First Discovery to the Year 1732, edited by Michael Kammen (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 226.

11. Thomas Fitch Letterbook, microfilm M-1422, Joseph Downs Library, Winterthur Museum. The original letterbooks are in the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. On the siege of La Rochelle and its importance to the history of American Huguenot artisans, see Neil D. Kamil, “War, Natural Philosophy, and the Metaphysical Foundations of Artisanal Thought in an American Mid-Atlantic Colony: La Rochelle, New York City, and the Southwestern Huguenot Paradigm, 1517–1730” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1989), chapter 1; on the Fitch-Faneuil relationship, the European background of both, and the trade in leather chairs between Boston and New York, see ibid., chapters 6–7. For the most reliable Faneuil genealogy and the family’s transatlantic trading and patronage network, see J. F. Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 1 (January 1995): 84–92. For the best recent work on the Atlantic trading society of La Rochelle’s mercantile community in Canada, see J. F. Bosher, The Canada Merchants, 1713–1763 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 3–46 and 109–90; and J. F. Bosher, “The Imperial Environment of French Trade with Canada, 1660–1685,” English Historical Review 108 (Jan. 1993): 50–81.

12. Robert J. Gough, “The Myth of the ‘Middle Colonies’: An Analysis of Regionalization in Early America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103 (July 1983): 394–95. Gough borrows the term “human region” from Lewis Mumford.

13. Fitch Letterbook.

14. Fitch Letterbook.

15. Population figures from Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 178–80. The middle colonies were among the fastest growing regions between 1660 and 1710 owing largely to the “push factor” caused by the continental Wars of Religion. The concerns of the Board of Trade were focused initially on woolens manufactured on Long Island. See letters from Lord Cornbury to Secretary Hodges in 1705, Caleb Heathcote to the Board of Trade on August 3, 1708, and Governor Hunter to the Board of Trade on November 12, 1715, in E. B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New York, 4 vols. (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parsons, and Comp., 1850–51), 1:711–14.

16. For a detailed reconstruction of Faneuil’s Aunisian and Saintongeais craft network in New York City, see Neil D. Kamil, Discursive Things: Language, Form and Convergence in New York Colony, 1646–1709 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).

17. David Ormrod, “The Atlantic Economy and the ‘Protestant Capitalist International,’ 1651–1775,” Historical Research 66, no. 160 (June 1993): 197–207. See also J. F. Bosher, “Huguenot Merchants, pp. 77–100.

18. Fitch Letterbook.

19. Robert F. Trent, “The Endicott Chairs,” Essex Institutite Historical Collections, 114, no. 2 (April 1978): 117–18.

20. Queens College, Klapper Library, Historical Documents Collection (hereinafter cited QC, KL, HDC), Albany, II, fol. 2–84. When appraisers referred to condition, “old” was often accompanied by specific qualifiers such as “broken” or “much abused.”

21. The armchair was sold at the Litchfield Auction Gallery in Litchfield, Connecticut on January 6, 1991. The consignors reportedly purchased it from an unremembered “dealer in Greenwich, Connecticut about forty years ago.” The author thanks Frank Cowan and the Litchfield Auction Gallery for this information. On the Parisian “grand” chair, see Peter Thornton, “Upholstered Seat Furniture in Europe, 17th and 18th Centuries,” in Upholstery in America and Europe from the Seventeenth Century to World War I, edited by Edward S. Cooke Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 33, fig. 8.

22. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “escritoire” first appears in English in 1611. The migration pattern of the Cortelyou family is typical of the “old” (pre-Revocation) Huguenot diaspora, which usually made its way to New Amsterdam-New York by way of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Jacques Cortelyou was the first of the family to settle in New Amsterdam, where he was surveyor-general for the Dutch West India Company by 1660. It was in this capacity that Jacques executed his axiometric view of New Amsterdam in 1660, which served as the model for the well-known Castello Plan of 1670 (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence). For more on the Cortelyou and Castello plans, see Roderick H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America 1609–1776 (Albany, N.Y.: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988), p. 93. Cortelyou was born in Utrecht around 1625; nevertheless, in September 1679 Jasper Dankers wrote: “Jacques [Cortelyou] is a man advanced in years. He was born in Utrecht, but of French parents as we could readily discover from all his actions, looks, and language. He studied philosophy in his youth [at the University of Utrecht] and spoke Latin and good French. He was a mathematician and sworn land-surveyor. He had also formerly learned several sciences, and had some knowledge of medicine” (Jasper Dankers, Journal of a Voyage to New York, as quoted in Maud Esther Dilliard, Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn [New York: Richard R. Smith, 1945], n. p.). On February 16, 1660, Cortelyou laid out twenty-two lots to establish the town of Bushwick (Bos Wyck, or “Town in the Woods”). This Huguenot settlement began when fourteen refugees removed to Brooklyn from New Amsterdam (ibid.).

23. The Journal of John Fontaine, pp. 114–15. Fontaine’s father was born in the town of Jenouille in Saintonge in 1658. The diary references are for October 26 and October 29, 1716.

24. For an analysis of Kings County and New York City kasten, see Peter M. Kenny, Frances Gruber Stafford, and Gilbert T. Vincent, American Kasten: The Dutch-Style Cupboards of New York and New Jersey, 1650–1800 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), pp. 16–21 and entry 8. For the story of the Flushing Remonstrance, see Henry D. Waller, History of the Town of Flushing (Flushing, N.Y., 1899), p. 44; Haynes Trebor, The Flushing Remonstrance (Flushing, N.Y., 1957), pp. 3–4; and Neil D. Kamil, “New Approaches to Religion, Popular Culture, and Material Life in Early America: The Middle Colonies and the Upper South as a Case Study,” in Religion, Popular Culture and Material Life in the Middle Colonies and the Upper South, 1650–1800, edited by John J. McCusker and Neil D. Kamil (College Park, Md.: Maryland Colloquium on Early American History, 1990), pp. 34–36.

25. John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 235, fig. 752.

26. Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France & Holland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 180–82. The Huguenot settlement at Manakin, Virginia, located twenty miles above the fall line on the James River (or perhaps other Huguenot settlements in southeastern Virginia), is a second, less likely point of origin for this armchair. I am grateful to Luke Beckerdite for bringing this chair to my attention and for sharing his insights on the role of the large population of French refugee artisans in the furniture production of both Virginia and South Carolina. Beckerdite’s research will be the subject of a forthcoming article. For an introduction to the history of the Manakin settlement, see James L. Bugg, “Manakin Town in Virginia: Its Story and Its People” (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1950).

27. Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration, pp. 198–202.

28. On the “double poire,” see Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 226.

29. The Van Cortlandt leather armchair may have been made for Stephanus Van Cortlandt (1643–1700) shortly before or after the construction of his manor house, built ca. 1697. If so, it probably passed to Philip Van Cortlandt (1683–1748) after his father’s death in 1700. Alternatively, the chair may have been made for Philip, since it could date as late as 1720. Upon Philip’s death, it was willed to Pierre Van Cortlandt (1721–1814). With the death of Pierre, the armchair passed to Pierre Van Cortlandt II (1762–1843) and subsequently to Pierre III. On the death of Pierre’s wife Catherine Beck in 1895, the chair descended to her daughter, Catherine T. R. Van Cortlandt ( May 2, 1838–February 19, 1921), who married John Rutherford Mathews (November 29, 1835–December 27, 1898). Finally, the chair passed to their daughter, Isabel Rutherford Mathews (May 1, 1878–July 24, 1909). The chair was one of the few items withheld when the Van Cortlandt Manor furnishings were auctioned by Parke Bernet Galleries in New York on February 6–8, 1941, and March 7, 1942. Instead, it was was sold to John D. Rockefeller Jr., who displayed it in the Beekman Wing of Philipsburg Manor, Tarrytown, New York, the first of the properties that he purchased and conserved for Historic Hudson Valley. Catherine Van Cortlandt Mason Browne sold the manor house in 1945. In 1953, Rockefeller purchased the house for Historic Hudson Valley, and in 1959, he returned the Van Cortlandt leather armchair to the second-story hall, where it remains today. See Joseph T. Butler, The Family Collections at Van Cortlandt Manor (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1967), pp. 20, 42–3; “The Ancestral Record of the Family of Van Cortlandt,” handwritten ms., Library, Historic Hudson Valley; and Auction Catalogues, Parke Bernet Galleries, New York, February 6–8, 1941, and March 7, 1942. The author thanks Joseph T. Butler, Director and Curator Emeritus of Collections at Historic Hudson Valley, for much of the information used to compile this genealogy.

30. The chair was in the Bybee Collection, Dallas, Texas, when it was nearly destroyed by fire in the 1970s. The remains of the scorched frame are now in storage at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

31. This construction evidence should further discredit the argument that the New York leather chair was produced either in Boston or in the Piscataqua region of New Hampshire. The Piscataqua origin, advanced by some dealers and antiquarians during the 1960s, is largely based on dubious recovery histories and is difficult to accept because of that region’s close proximity to Boston. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, southeastern New Hampshire did not have an urban upholstery trade capable of competing with Boston’s powerful network of artisans and merchants. The inhabitants of the Piscataqua region were relatively dispersed; many of those who owned leather chairs purchased them in Boston or through a branch of that city’s commercial network. The Piscataqua leather chair “thesis” has not received support in recent publications on the early New Hampshire furniture industry (see Brock Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992]; Gerald W. R. Ward, “Three Centuries of Life Along the Piscataqua River,” Antiques 142, no. 1 [July 1992]: 60–65; and Gerald W. R. Ward and Karin E. Cullity, “The Furniture,” Antiques 142, no. 1 [July 1992]: 94–103).

32. I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 6 vols. (New York: H. R. Dodd, 1915–28), 4:422. Historian Charles W. Baird argued that Jean was probably born in St. Lo, Normandy, because that was the ancestral seat of the family name Chevalier (Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America, 2 vols. [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1885], 2:280). However, I discovered many Chevaliers in the archives for Saintonge, where it was a common Huguenot name. Like many Huguenots from the northwestern coast of France, Jean’s branch of the Le Chevalier family may have moved to the southwest during the civil wars. Strong evidence of a Saintongeais origin for the Le Chevaliers of New Amsterdam–New York is in the “Réceuil de Manuscrits sur les Églises Réformées de France reunie par les soins de Mr. Alexandre Crottet, ancien Pasteur des Église Réformées de Pons, Gemozac et Mortagne en Saintonge,” Charleston Library Society, Charleston, South Carolina (SCHS-51-31-1). There were also numerous Jean Chevaliers recorded in the birth, marriage, death, and burial registers of Aunis in the seventeenth century, where they were located predominantly on the coast, particularly on Île de Ré and in La Rochelle. See “Table des Baptêmes faits à St. Martin îsle de Ré par M. Barbault, le père, ministre en 1685, jusques et compris le mois de Septembre. Copiée sur le Registre de la dite Égise de 1685,” in Notes et Collections d’Érudits, Archives Préfectures de La Rochelle, files J. 102 and 103, handwritten manuscripts by J. Pandin de Lussaudiere, n.p.; and Edward Elbridge Salisbury, Family Memorials: A Series of Genealogical and Biographical Monographs, 2 vols. (New York: privately printed, 1885), 2:540–44. Salisbury argues, on the basis of the unique Chevalier coat-of-arms, that Jean Le Chevalier Sr. probably came from Brittany rather than Normandy, however, Salisbury also states that the family was fragmented early into separate branches that moved to other areas of France. All of this evidence suggests that the Le Chevaliers of New York originated in Normandy and that a branch moved to Saintonge. After the Revocation, Jean Le Chevalier’s family moved to London. On April 9, 1687, they appeared on a list of refugees who received a warrant for naturalization at Whitehall. Jean Jr., the eldest child, would then have been about seventeen years of age. There may have been a branch of this family in Charleston, South Carolina, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as well. Joiner Pierre Le Chevalier’s property is listed on A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina, published by Edward Crisp and printed ca. 1711 ( The author thanks Luke Beckerdite for this information).

33. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2:212. New York Historical Manuscripts Dutch: The Register of Salomon Lachaire Notary Public of New Amsterdam, 1661, 1662, translated by E.B. O’Callachan, edited and introduction by Kenneth Scott and Kenneth Stryker-Rodda (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1978), xii, xvi. Salomon La Chaire was baptised in Amsterdam’s Walloon Church on January 30, 1628. For Jean Chevalier’s City Hall contract, see I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 4:305.

34. New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 15, no. 1 (January 1884): 36. Valenciennes entered the maelstrom of Reformation confessional conflict as early as 1560, when public singing of Marot’s psalms and other “impious songs” was deemed threatening enough to warrant an official interdiction of similar heretical activities. See Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 99.

35. See Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2:80. For Le Chevalier’s involvement in the L’Eglise Francais, see Collections of the Huguenot Society of America (New York, 1886). For a longer discussion of the significance of Le Chevalier’s dual church allegiances, see Neil Duff Kamil, “Of American Kasten,” p. 278. For more on Joshua Delaplaine’s artisanal activity, see J. Steward Johnson, “New York Cabinetmaking Prior to the Revolution” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1964), pp. 23–24.

36. New York State Calendar: English, 1664–1776 15 (Albany: Office of the Secretary of State, N.Y. 1865–66), p. 247. New York Historical Society Collections (New York: Printed for the Society, 1886): 58. John Chevalier vs. Duie Hungerford, Mayor’s Court, June 11, 1700; and Albany I, fol. 1-11, QC, KL, HDC. In an indenture dated June 1, 1700, New York joiner Edward Burling agreed to “Give to his Said Apprentice [Thomas Sutton] a good Sett of Carpenters Tools & Shall learn him to write Read & Cypher” (New York Historical Society Collections [New York: Printed for the Society, 1886]: 585). On Jean Bouyer (Bouhier), see Morgan H. Seacord, Biographical Sketches and Index of the Huguenot Settlers of New Rochelle, 1687–1776 (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1941), p. 15.

37. See account of payments made by Thomas Weaver, Customs House, June 25, 1701, to September 25, 1701, in An Account of Her Majesty’s Revenue in the Province of New York, 1701–1709: The Customs Records of Early Colonial New York, edited by Julius Block, Leo Hershkowitz, Kenneth Scott, and Constance D. Sherman (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1966), p. 34.

38. A communicant in New York’s first Trinity Church, the wealthiest and most politically powerful Anglican congregation in the city, Ellison’s status was assured when he received the prestigious contract to build its first pulpit on October 5, 1696 (First Recorded Minutes Regarding the Building of Trinity Church in the City of New York: 1696–1697, Trinity Church, Office of the Parish Archives; and Corporation of Trinity Church Minutes of the Vestry, Trinity Church, Office of the Parish Archives, I: 1697–1791, 221–22, 229). As of November 16, 1725, Ellison’s outstanding debts totaled £8165.1.1-1/2, and Jean Le Chevalier was among the debtors. See the inventory and “Book Debts from the ledger of John Ellison, in the hands of John Ellison, Jr.” (also a joiner), Albany, I, fol. 2–94, QC, KL, HDC; and Inventory of John Ellison Jr., October 6, 1730, New York Historical Society Manuscript Division.

39. Fitch Letterbook. See also New York Historical Society Collections (1886): 87. Richard Lott “upholsterer” became a freeman on September 30, 1707. The Mayor’s Court referred to him as a “chairmaker” in a suit for nonpayment of debts (Richard Lott vs. Johannes Cuyler and John Cruger,
October 21, 1710, QC, KL, HDC).

40. Fitch Letterbooks. On the notion of “unintended performance,” see J. G. A. Pocock, The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 31; and Peter Sahlins, “Fictions of a Catholic France: The Naturalization of Foreigners, 1685–1787,” Representations 47 (summer 1994): 97.

41. By 1720, New York hardware merchants began stocking British upholstery materials in response to their declining availability from Boston merchants. Abraham Brock, lately “merchant of Bristol,” offered a tremendous quantity of textiles and yardgoods, woodworkers’ tools, a variety of hinges, latches, and standard upholsterery materials including “7/8 of a gross of girth webb att 1.0.3,” “41 bosses [probably boss-nails or metal studs] 0.3.5,” and “3 Doz Tufting nails 0.3.5” (Inventory of Abraham Brock, May 4, 1720, QC, KL, HDC, folio 2–37).
42. A. V. Phillips, The Lott Family in America (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edward Brothers, 1942), pp. 1–2; see also Collections of the St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York: Genealogical Record (New York: Printed for the Society, 1934), 4:185. On patterns of Huguenot migration, see Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of the Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 6. For example, George and Monwers Lott of New Utrecht were both carpenters, active in the 1750s.

43. Archives Départmentales de la Charente-Maritime, B 1325; 1350; 1417; 1492; 1568; and, E Supplt. 297; 317; 364; 800; 906; 907; 913. For evidence concerning members of the Suire family who were prone to conflict with both religious and secular authorities, see Archives Départmentales de la Charente Maritime (hereafter ADCM), E Supplt. 317 and 369, 1746–48.

44. On Suire’s Saintongeais background, see Morgan H. Seacord, Biographical Sketches and Index of the Huguenot Settlers of New Rochelle, p. 50. Inventory of John Swear, March 12, 1715, QC, KL, HDC, Albany II, fol. 2–256.

45. Although the tools, materials, and skills involved in saddlery, leather upholstery, and shoemaking are related, Suire is unusual in having worked as a joiner and shoemaker. However, as we have seen, the Suires of La Rochelle ran an ordinary that shoemakers frequented with enough regularity to merit the attention of local police.

46. Some early Louisiana furniture was undoubtedly made by creole slaves and freedmen working in distinctive French regional idioms (see Jessie J. Poesch, Early Furniture of Louisiana, 1750–1830 [New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1972], pp. 18–19, 33). New York artisans also exploited slave labor, a fact evidenced by Jean Suire’s “1 Negro about 8 yeares. . .12:0:0” (Inventory of John Swear). On African American artisans in early New York, see Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1991). On the church of St. Étienne, see Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Inventaire Général des Monuments et des Richesses Artistiques de la France: Commission Regionale de Poitou-Charentes, Charente-Maritime, Cantons Île de Ré (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1979), pp. 153, 184–85.

47. Given this regional association, it is not surprising that the carved crest and front stretchers of the chair also recall Italianate architectural models and designs carried into southwestern France from northern Italy during the late sixteenth century. Elite elements of southwestern Reformed culture—including local Saintongeais nobility and such churchmen as the young Jean Calvin—made the pilgrimage south to places such as Milan in Lombardy, a city and region with strong historic ties to the French church and monarchy. Some varieties of London cane chairs also evidence this turning sequence.

48. In 1685, John Thomas of Hempstead, Queens County, owned “6 Cane Chars 3/0/0 [and] 6 Black Chars 1/4/0” (inventoried in order to signify a full set of 12) but no leather chairs (Inventory of John Thomas, 1685, Albany I: 1–124, QC, KL, HDC).

49. Variants of the screen’s carved floral panels also relate to coastal Connecticut carved and painted furniture. Compare particularly with carved work on case furniture associated with Huguenot joiner Peter Blin of Wethersfield, Connecticut, and certain examples of painted furniture associated with the Connecticut shore, including two painted chests in Winterthur Museum. For illustration of the latter, see Dean A. Fales Jr., American Painted Furniture 1660–1880 (New York: Bonanza Books, 1986), pp. 26–27 (figs. 24–25). For evidence of other important Huguenot woodworking networks dispersed to the Long Island Sound region, see Robert F. Trent, “A Channel Islands Parallel for the Early Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Chests Attributed to Charles Guillam,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 2, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 75–91; and Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, “Connecticut Sunflower Furniture: A Familiar Form Reconsidered,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (Spring 1989): 21–38. On Ezekial Carré, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 226.

50. For the southwestern French backgrounds of the Durand and Coutant families, see Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2:21, 61, 332; 1:306. See also Jacqueline Calder, “Westchester County, New York Furniture,” Antiques 121, no. 5 (May 1982): 1195–98; Benno M. Forman, “The Crown and York Chairs of Coastal Connecticut and the Work of the Durands of Milford,” in Pilgrim Century Furniture: An Historical Survey, edited by Robert F. Trent (New York: Main Street/Universe Books, 1976), pp. 158–65; Robert F. Trent, Hearts and Crowns, pp. 29–59; and Kathleen Eagen Johnson, “The Fiddleback Chair,” in Early American Furniture from Settlement to City: Aspects of Form, Style, and Regional Design from 1620 to 1830, edited by Mary Jean Madigan and Susan Colgan (New York: Billboard Publications, 1983), pp. 92–97. See also Trent, “A Channel Islands Parallel,” and Schoelwer, “Connecticut Sunflower Furniture.”

51. What I call creolization is well documented as an art historical process in England and the Low Countries in Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration.

52. Forman, “The Crown and York Chairs,” p. 158, fig. 1. On Pierre Durand, see Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2:332.

53. The term “life of form” is borrowed from Henri Focillion’s seminal essay of the same name, Vie des Formes (Paris, 1934). Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 292–94.

54. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 292–94. In different examples using the same artifactual language, truncated columns, vases, twists, and other lapidary forms stacked symmetrically between and above the balusters are also commonly found. The Van Cortlandt leather armchair is exceptional in that it does not have a slit under the crest rail. The term “French hollow” was never acknowledged by Forman, although he did carefully note this formal idiosyncracy in relation to Boston models.

55. Ibid., pp. 293–94.

56. Ibid., p. 293, caption for fig. 162. See in particular the London cane armchair illustrated in Peter M. Kenny, “Flat Gates, Draw Bars, Twists, and Urns: New York’s Distinctive, Early Baroque Oval Tables with Falling Leaves,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 120, fig. 25. The posts of this chair are nearly the same as the leather armchair illustrated in figure 27. In a recent discussion of the London high-back turkeywork chair illustrated in figure 38, Margaret Swain argued that the slit in the chair’s crest rail may have been to accommodate varying, pre-cut sizes of turkeywork upholstery exclusively, and that “many” of the surviving New York chairs now covered in leather were probably originally upholstered in turkeywork (Margaret Swain, “The Turkey-work Chairs of Holyroodhouse,” in Cooke, ed., Upholstery in America and Europe, pp. 56–57). This theory is undermined by several chairs with this construction technique and original leather upholstery, including the “European” leather chair and a New York leather chair at the Van Alen house in Kinderhook, New York (Collections of the Columbia County Historical Society), as well as by evidence that leather panels may also have been pre-cut. More likely, the slit was simply a sturdy, efficient, and economical way to upholster both turkeywork and leather chairs. Two similar, carved, “barley twist” London cane chairs descended in the Wright family of Oyster Bay, Long Island, and the Smith family of New York City and Setauket, Long Island. Both are illustrated in Dean F. Failey, Long Island is My Nation, The Decorative Arts and Craftsmen: 1640–1830 (Setauket, N.Y.: Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, 1976), p. 24, figs. 19, 20.

57. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. 293, fig. 162. Daniel Marot’s contribution to the Anglo-French and Dutch court style is discussed at length in Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration, pp. 40–96.

58. Inventaire Général, p. 153. There is a local tradition that the choir screen may have originally been made for the Jesuit chapel in Saintes, the principal Gallo-Roman city in Saintonge, but there is no evidence to support this assertion. It probably dates from 1629, but its present overall form is the result of restoration campaigns undertaken in 1845 and 1891 when the screen, which had been separated into three distinct sections during the eighteenth century, was reassembled.

59. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 152–3. This great chair may have been made by Jean Le Chevalier’s paternal grandfather, “Jan Cavelier,” who framed and repaired the royal arms on New York’s city hall in 1675 or by a contemporary New York joiner and carver. Most significantly, as the subject of diffusion of motifs, a cherub with goat feet appears as a central motif in the recently discovered design book of John Berger (fl. ca. 1718–32), a Boston Huguenot painter-stainer whose family originated in La Rochelle. See Robert A. Leath, “Jean Berger’s Design Book: Huguenot Tradesmen and the Dissemination of French Baroque Style,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 137, 145.

60. As quoted in Peter Sahlins, “Fictions of a Catholic France,” p. 85. State-sponsored suppression of heresy did not end officially in France until the Edict of Toleration in November 1787.

61. For a fuller development of my argument concerning animate materialism in southwestern France, see Neil D. Kamil, Fortresses of the Soul: Metaphysics and Artisanal Experience in a New World (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). The use of this method and language is exemplified by Jon Butler in The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), esp. Part II, “The Disappearance of the Huguenots in America,” pp. 69–198. For Butler’s argument that “no significant stylistic differences separate the work of Huguenot from non-Huguenot silversmiths in the colonies,” see ibid., pp. 178–81. As quoted in Arthur Herman, “The Saumur Assembly, 1611: Huguenot Political Belief and Action in the Age of Marie de Medici” (Ph. D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985), p. 36.

62. For a good discussion of the interaction in social history methodology of folklore, linguistics, creolization, and pluralistic cultural convergence, see Charles Joyner, “A Single Southern Culture: Cultural Interaction in the Old South,” in Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South, edited by Ted Ownby (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 11–17. For the two classic formulations of this methodology, see Dell Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), and William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (New York: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1966), see esp. pp. 7–15.

63. Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 9–11. See also Neil D. Kamil, Discursive Things.

64. The term “French turned,” which occasionally occurs in English accounts and inventories of the seventeenth century, refers to the inward spiral shaping brought to London by Huguenot turners. Spiral turning, when reduced to two dimensions, appears as a series of concentric circles. See R. W. Symonds, “Charles II Couches, Chairs and Stools, 1660–1670,” Connoisseur 93, no. 389 (January 1934): 19–20. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall suggests that, in general, French handling of public and private space is “sociopetal,” whereas the English is “sociofugal” (Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension [New York: Anchor Books, 1969], pp. 146–48).

65. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 48.

66. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965), p. 29. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, edited by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 229–30. On cultural theory and the control of knowledge, see Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. p. 19: “In cognitive theory . . . the psyche is . . . primarily social. The social preoccupations of the person, infant or adult, would be like control gates through which all information has to pass. . . . News that is going to be accepted as true information has to be wearing a badge of loyalty to the particular political regime which the person supports; the rest is suspect, deliberately censored or unconsciously ignored.”

67. Quotations are taken from the title page (Paris: Pierre Billaine, 1638). I am grateful to Orest Ranum for bringing this important reference to my attention.

68. See the epigraph that heads this essay.

69. In this context, perhaps the best evidence of the instability of convergence was the inability of New York’s artisans to respond effectively to the more complex symbolic language that accompanied Boston’s new fashioned “crook’d back” chair with “horsebone feet”—the artifact that finally supplanted the Boston and New York plain leather chair after it first appeared in the city around 1722. This chair was defined by both its upholstery and its frame. For more on the Boston “crook’d back” chair, see Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 296–356. For the classic text on the mechanically reproduced artifact, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–52. See also Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. ix–xxii.