Grandma Moses in the Twenty-First Century at the Wadsworth

"I had just finished an article on Boston bombé furniture for the Chipstone journal American Furnitureand was casting about for something else to study. My partner, John Driggers, and I happened to get in a set of chairs attributed to the Seymours for conservation," says the head of Robert D. Mussey Associates, a consortium of specialists in everything from carving to gilding that works in a converted brick factory building on the outskirts of Boston.

Despite their appalling state of disrepair, the chairs were clearly extraordinary. "The joinery was a cut above that on any Boston chair of this period that I had seen," recollects Mussey, who subsequently coined the term "Boston Regency" to describe their design.

Scholarly interest in the Seymours dates to the discovery, in the mid-1920s, of two labeled tambour secretaries, a signature Seymour form. In 1959, Stoneman, a labor lawyer and avid collector of Seymour furniture, published the first book-length treatise on the craftsmen, John and Thomas Seymour: Cabinetmakers in Boston, 1794-1816.He followed with a supplement in 1965. Remarkably, there had been virtually no new research since.

"Stoneman based many of his attributions of specific pieces on their use of one or more of a small group of veneer stringing patterns, such as the lunette pattern, which he initially believed were unique and reliable signifiers of Seymour's work," writes Mussey, who regards Stoneman's contribution as monumental, even though he was overzealous in his designations.

As a model for his own endeavor, Mussey chose Honore Lannuier, Cabinetmaker from Paris, Peter Kenny's exemplary 1998 book and exhibition. He asked Kenny, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing, and Winterthur curator Wendy Cooper, both impeccable scholars, to advise him. It was their guidance, along with the steadfast encouragement of Peabody Essex Museum curator Dean Lahikainen, project coordinator for the book, exhibition and symposium, that enabled Mussey to uncover the wealth of new detail that led to his groundbreaking conclusions.

Mussey began by scouring Boston area archives for references to the many prominent families - among them the Codmans, Amorys and Derbys - who had owned Seymour furniture. At the Boston Public Library, a single entry led him to a cache of 500 letters from the Cranch and Bond families. These provided important insights into the Seymours' West Country origins, as well as details about their New World patrons.

"No one had ever really attempted to trace an important American cabinetmaker back to England. That was a feat," says the conservator, who, with Anne Rogers, now Northeast Auction's London liaison, trawled the English countryside for receipts and other evidence of Seymour's work for wealthy gentry there between 1775 and 1783.

"We only found three pieces of furniture that were probably or possibly made by Seymour in Devon," says Mussey. One, a demilune card table with the chalk inscription "JS," was purchased in New Jersey in 1987 by New York dealers Margaret Caldwell and Carlo Florentino.

"What really comes out of the story of John Seymour in England was that he was not a terribly successful cabinetmaker. In fact, he was more of a joiner and carpenter with aspirations to be a cabinetmaker. That, and ambitions for his children, probably compelled him to come to this country," Mussey says.

Over the years, others contributed to the project, which was initially funded solely by Robert D. Mussey Associates but later received major support from the Kaufman Americana Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Skinner and Christie's, among others. Johanna McBrien conducted archival research one day a week for two years under the funding of Wayne Pratt Antiques. Essex, Mass., dealer Clark Pearce, who has been helping to build a major private collection, became a "faithful sounding board" and avid student. Riderwood, Md., dealer Milly McGehee sent numerous Seymour pieces to the conservator for study. Albert Sack, writes Mussey, offered him the best advice of all. "Be careful, young man," the dealer warned.

For a chapter on the Seymours' Portland sojourn, Mussey relied on Laura Fecych Sprague, who drew heavily on invoices and accounts books at the Maine Historical Society. A lady's secretary that came to light almost too late to be included in The Furniture Masterworks of John & Thomas Seymour is the earliest known Portland piece by John Seymour. It was purchased by its present owners at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries in March 2002.

Ever in search of better prospects, the Seymours moved to Boston in 1793 where John's son Joseph had several years earlier set himself up as an engraver. The cabinetmakers initially had a small shop, but no showroom or established clientele. Six pieces have been found bearing the label "John Seymour & Son, Cabinet Makers, Creek Square, Boston." They probably date from between 1793 and 1795.

"I've come to the firm conclusion that Thomas was the greater genius of the two. This goes against what has been imagined," says Mussey, who identifies the Seymours' most accomplished work as post-1804, the year the Seymours opened their Boston Furniture Warehouse on what is now Tremont Street near Boston Common. "John came to this country as a good but not brilliant regional English furniture maker. Thomas seems to have been the one with the real ambition, both for design and for business."

In true American fashion, Thomas Seymour succeeded by expanding with capital acquired through several short-lived partnerships. He broadened his market by adding other products, such as lighting and carpeting, and catered to the middle class as well as the elite. Most important, he associated himself with some of Boston's greatest talents, including the cabinetmaker James Cogswell, the carver Thomas Wightman, the upholsterer William Lemon and possibly the ivory turner William Callendar.

A superb sideboard now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art testifies to the success of these collaborations. Retailed by Ginsburg & Levy early in the Twentieth Century, it combines Thomas Seymour's extraordinary veneer and stringing work with Thomas Wightman's acanthus-leaf and blossom carvings. "The sideboard is among the greatest masterpieces produced in the Seymour shop, evincing a maturity and aesthetic integration made possible only by Seymour's reliance on Boston's best British immigrant artisans," writes Mussey.

Thomas Jefferson's 1807-09 embargo on trade with Britain, followed by the War of 1812, spelled bankruptcy for many New England merchants and artisans. For the Seymours, it was a financial blow from which they seem to have never fully recovered. John Seymour died destitute in a Boston's almshouse in 1818. Thomas Seymour closed his Boston Furniture Manufactory, a successor to the Boston Furniture Warehouse, in 1817 and worked for other cabinetmakers, most notably for Isaac Vose and Son. Forgotten for nearly two decades, Thomas Seymour died in 1848, age 77.

"The source material principally is the furniture itself. It is drop-dead gorgeous," says Mussey, who, while documenting the lives of the Seymours through archives, concurrently sought to create a template for identifying what is and is not Seymour furniture.

"I started with labeled and initialed pieces and built out from a core of what we absolutely knew. I discovered that the Seymours' techniques of construction are really pretty distinctive and based on English precedent. Thomas Americanized somewhat, but he always retained certain core methods of construction that are quite English in their derivation," says the conservator.

For the first major retrospective of the Seymours' work, Mussey selected 70 pieces of furniture, augmented by paintings, silver and other objects, which, together, illustrate the Boston milieu of the Seymours and their privileged clients. Lahikainen, the Carolyn and Peter Lynch curator of American decorative arts at the Peabody Essex Museum, created a script for the show and developed its major themes.

The first gallery displays such items as a sideboard made for the Amory family and a card table created for George Crowninshield, along with portraits of their owners by Gilbert Stuart and Samuel F.B. Morse. Five card tables illustrate the evolution of the neoclassical style as articulated by Thomas Seymour, from his early Hepplewhite designs to his later Grecian pieces. Subsequent galleries are organized as an abstraction of a house, with stylized vignettes grouping pieces as they would have been used in the parlor, dining room and bedchamber.

"For the final section we have selected seven masterpieces," says Lahikainen. Included is a commode with paintings of shells by John Penniman and a sideboard, both from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; a dressing table and mirror made for Elizabeth Derby West, in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum; and, from private collections, a tall clock, a gaming table inlaid with Italian marble and a side chair. Also shown is a demilune card table from the Kaufman collection. It is the mate to the labeled example that sold at Sotheby's in 1998 to Israel Sack Inc, for $541,500, still a record price for Seymour furniture.

"It was a monumental undertaking tracking these pieces down through hundreds of institutions, dealers and collectors. The Peabody Essex Museum has ended up with an archive that is an amazing resource on the Seymours," notes Lahikainen, who hopes his next project will be on Samuel McIntire, who is similarly well-known but little studied.

If the Seymour project was an unqualified success, the same cannot be said of the cabinetmakers themselves. Concludes Mussey, "John and Thomas Seymour's lives and those of their families instruct us that even for those hard-working immigrants touched with genius, the American dream could be heartbreakingly elusive. The rewards for John and Thomas Seymour were not found in either Portland or Boston. We are simply left with their brilliant furniture as a testament to their quest for a 'better country.'"

The Peabody Essex Museum is on East India Square. For information, 866-745-1876 or www.pem.org.