Bayou Bend: Information

Some of America's noted authorities on decorative arts are featured in the 2000-2001 Bayou Bend Lecture Series.

Lectures are on Thursdays at 7:00 p.m. and last one hour. They are held in Brown Auditorium, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet. For additional information, please call (713) 639-7750.

October 19, 2000

"Made for the Southern Market: The 19th-Century Furniture Trade in New Orleans"

Stephen G. Harrison
Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts
Dallas Museum of Art

Stephen Harrison will explore the dynamic furniture trade in New Orleans during the nineteenth century. This transition from the products of craftsmen to the world of mass production will be discussed in light of extensive new documentation and surviving labeled furniture. Finally, this talk will reveal the diverse range of furniture forms and styles available to the consumer during the nineteenth century in New Orleans.

November 16, 2000

"Trés Chic: French Influence annd Early Nineteenth Century American Silver"

Donald L. Fennimore
Senior Curator, Metals, Winterthur Museum

Beginning with a discussion of silver made in France following the French Revolution, and the influences on its design, Donald Fennimore will then explore the stylistic characteristics of silver in America during the nineteenth century. While French taste was always admired and present to a degree in colonial America, it rose to unprecedented heights in the early decades of the nineteenth century, not only in the products of sophisticated East Coast metropolitan centers, but in silver produced by makers in all urban centers of the country.

January 18, 2001

"Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861"

Catherine Hoover Voorsanger
Executive Director, The Historic Natchez Foundation

In America during the second quarter of the nineteenth century--between 1825, when the Erie Canal was built, and 1861, when the Civil War began--the visual arts proliferated. Catherine Voorsanger explores the history of American art of this period as epitomized in New York City, which at that time blossomed into the largest city in the Western Hemisphere and became the center of manufacturing, culture, and the arts. Her discussion will include examples from a variety of media--paintings, sculpture, architectural and city planning documents, photography, lithography, and the full gamut of decorative arts, including furniture, silver, ceramics, and glass.

February 22, 2001

"Bayou Bend and the Colonial Revival"

Richard Guy Wilson
Professor, History of Architecture, University of Virginia

Bayou Bend, built between 1927 and 1929, falls into the category of American country houses designed in the Colonial Revival style. Richard Guy Wilson puts Bayou Bend in the context of this great stylistic movement, and discusses how Miss Ima Hogg and her architects, John Staub and Birdsall Briscoe, created this treasure on the bayou.

March 22, 2001

"Providence Provenances and Pitched Pediments: A Different Rhode Island Block and Shell Story"

Wendy Ann Cooper
Lois F. and Henry S. McNeil Senior Curator of Furniture
Winterthur Museum

While Newport, Rhode Island, and particularly the cabinetmaking families of the Goddards and the Townsends are best known for the creation of that uniquely American design, the block and shell, recent scholarship indicates that the nearby cite of Providence was more important in eighteenth-century cabinetmaking than had previously been thought. Wendy Cooper explores some of the new discoveries about furniture in eighteenth-century Providence.

Top

This website was a created as a class project by students at the University of Houston College of Education. It is not the approved website for the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens or the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Refer to the MFAH website for information about Bayou Bend at: http://www.mfah.org.