WILLIAMSBURG, VA. -- Southern furniture - once dismissed as derivative, debased, or just funny looking - is finally receiving the public attention it has long deserved in the landmark exhibition "Furniture of the American South," which opened in early November at Colonial Williamsburg's DeWitt Wallace Gallery and will run throughout 1998. Curators Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown have placed more than 150 examples on display from one of the strongest regional collections in the country and, to set the record straight for all time, have also co-authored a monumental 640-page catalogue, Southern Furniture 1680-1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection.

In the preface, Hurst spoke of the need for such a volume: "Since 1920, more than 200 books have been written about furniture from the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies, but fewer than a dozen have addressed Southern cabinetmaking in significant depth. This disparity is partly due to the widely held belief that little or no furniture was made in the South, a misapprehension that has been disproved repeatedly in recent decades."

When American furniture collecting began in earnest in the 1920s, good taste in antiques was narrowly defined by the formal conventions laid down by early cabinetmakers in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Pennsylvania Dutch objects were considered the best country workmanship. Even other regional examples or styles from the surrounding areas in the Northeast were considered more aberration than variation.

Jonathan Prown, associate curator of furniture at Williamsburg, has been working on the exhibition and its catalogue for more than seven years. He explains how these misapprehensions of the past affected the South even more deeply. "Southern objects were often viewed as warped interpretations of Northern models. Part of the problem was that for a hundred years now we've been working under a decorative arts vocabulary that's defined what American furniture is, and it was defined through Northern eyes. So the very vocabulary in use has not been receptive to Southern objects. If a piece looked different, people thought it was probably Southern and probably not worth our time to look at."

This attitude is gradually changing, according to Prown. "By looking at the artifacts, whether it was furniture or ceramics that were made in the South, we really can see very good evidence of how different that culture was. What we find is that pieces in our collection are actually not all that rare. It's simply that we've had to redefine how we look at old furniture. When we switch the aesthetic rules, all of a sudden we can look around old collections in the South and find tons of Southern furniture."

The curator continues, "Our current stance is that the South is simply a different part of the country and it always has been. That's why we had the Civil War. These were two fundamentally different cultures. From day one, the Southern experiment was in a sense an entrepreneurial agrarian economy. Also they were much more directly tied to an Old World perspective, and they simply didn't keep pace with the kind of progressive industrial changes that were going on in the North. They didn't frankly have a need to. They brought cash crops to the market town where it was put on a boat and sent directly across the ocean. In return they got cash or fancy goods. There was really no need for them to branch out because it was such a profitable economy for that very small percentage of people who were at the top."

Although the trade system ensured that orders continue to be placed with English firms, Prown feels even more was bought from Southern craftsmen who worked in the areas where wealthy landowners lived. "Around the time of the Revolution in a place like Williamsburg, we think probably about 60 percent of their furniture was ordered locally. We know there were some very skilled artisans working, and probably the rest they got from sources in England because they had that direct contact through the trade."

Visitors to the exhibition are immediately made aware that, because of the constant contact with Britain and a general Southern conservatism in taste, the furniture in question resembles Old World models more closely than Northern examples. Williamsburg conservator F. Carey Howlett, who has examined most of the exhibits closely in the course of his work, expands on this theme. "If you really compare the furniture that was produced in New England and the furniture that was produced in the South to the British sources which most of these examples were derived from, you can't help but come to the conclusion that a lot of the New England stuff looks funny. It all depends on the perspective you're bringing to it. You can make this generalization about at least the coastal Southern pieces. They follow the styles from London more closely than the Northern ones, particularly those from New England."

The similarities are apparent in both informal and formal examples. For example, a simple hearthside armchair from Arundel Co, Md., is directly compared to similar pieces from Ireland and Wales, while the elegant Edenton, N.C., armchair illustrated here resembles numerous British models.

According to the Hurst and Prown catalogue entry on the Edenton armchair, "As with so many other Southern chairs, the pattern for these undoubtedly came to coastal North America in one of two ways. A local artisan copied an imported chair, or an immigrant British cabinet maker produced it."

In the past 25 years, Southern collectors from every state have become increasingly interested in acquiring well-documented examples of furniture made in their own regions, whether it might be a formal sideboard table from coastal Virginia or a simple desk from Tennessee. The basis of this documentation has been provided by a variety of regional surveys conducted by dedicated fieldworkers who recorded Southern-made objects, particularly the work carried on by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C., founded in 1965.

As far as "Furniture of the American South" is concerned, Prown admits, "We could not have done this project without MESDA, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. The work done there in compiling artists and information, doing the fieldwork and taking photos, made our project so much easier. We could not have done field research on that scale."

The new information available has made it possible for interested buyers to spot Southern examples for sale even when they turn up in an odd spot. Carey Howlett remembers one museum purchase, an eastern North Carolina desk that Colonial Williamsburg purchased at auction in New Hampshire a few years back. "One of the chief reasons we were able to get it was that the value wasn't recognized at this particular sale. They knew it was a Southern piece - probably because of the yellow pine secondary wood - but they had it listed as a Virginia desk. It's actually an eastern Carolina desk from a pretty thoroughly studied workshop, called the `W.H.' cabinetmaker. It's a very striking piece."

The conservator continues, "Like many of the other pieces from the South and any region, one of the biggest problems for a conservator in dealing with antique furniture is the fact that, so often, it's been compromised or altered in one way or another. In this case, the desk had lost about two inches of its feet, and the surface had been severely scraped, which was a serious problem with this piece because of the interesting ebonized shallow relief carving associated with this group of "W.H." furniture.

"This desk, like a lot of other pieces, was taken north in the early Twentieth Century. Somebody didn't like the way this ebonizing looked and scraped the surface down. We found traces of the decoration, and we were able to determine its extent, so we went ahead to recreate the missing ebonizing."

Dealers who specialize in such Southern furniture are delighted in the interest stirred up around the country by the new Williamsburg exhibition, which also enjoyed a preview in New York City at the Equitable Gallery on Seventh Avenue during September and October. Alexandria, Va., gallery owner Sumpter Priddy, III, a regular exhibitor at the annual Philadelphia Antiques Show, rejoices in the event. "This is the first time in many years that there's been a large body of material presented all at one time which gives a comprehensive view of furniture in the South. The South is rising again! "There's a lot of momentum in the region right now. The general economic climate is very strong. Business in general is doing well in the South. We're playing catch-up to what happened in the Northeast 20, 30, 40 years ago. We're now really coming into our own."

Jonathan Prown, Carey Howlett, and Sumpter Priddy were on the distinguished list of speakers who participated in the major symposium, "A Region of Regions: Cultural Diversity and the Furniture Trade in the Early South," held shortly after the exhibition's opening and related programs will continue throughout the coming year. The 50th anniversary session of the Williamsburg Antiques Forum, February 8-13, will focus on "Fashionable, Neat, and Good: The Arts of the Early South."

When asked "what's next?" Hurst and Prown refer to the fact that Williamsburg also has the most complete collection of English furniture in America, including rare regional pieces, much of which was acquired on massive buying trips to Britain undertaken by curators in the 1930s and 1940s. Jonathan Prown feels that the English themselves would benefit from a good book about English furniture. "They're just now getting interested in the type of regional studies that we have become very good at in America, and they're fascinated by our ability to do this. In a sense, we're ahead of them in many areas of furniture scholarship." So a curator's work is never done. The completion of one project simply signals the start of another.

The DeWitt Wallace Gallery displays Colonial Williamsburg's permanent collections of English and American antiques as well as special exhibitions. Hours are 10 am-5 pm daily except Tuesday; admission is included in tickets to the historic site. Also on display through September 8, 1998, are "Virginia Samplers: Young Ladies and Their Needle Wisdom." DeWitt Wallace Gallery, 757/220-7724.

Southern Furniture 1680-1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection by Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown ($75) has been published by Abrams to coincide with the opening of the exhibition. Through 836 illustrations, 220 in color, this volume reproduces 183 key examples of Southern furniture accompanied by well-written entries and extensive bibliography. Order directly from Williamsburg by calling 800/446-9240.