The Painted Furniture of French Canada, 1700-1840

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This major reference work is the first on painted furniture in Canada.
Both elegant and homespun, the worn furniture tugs at the heart. Its
evident age bespeaks generations of families, along with their
communities and their European heritage, who have loved and lived with
these pieces: a large bird with five-foot wing-span carved in pine for a
church; a graceful drop-leaf table from the Ottawa Valley; a folding
trestle table in a style common to garrison quarters in the 18th and
19th centuries; a merchant’s capacious desk; an alms box, its rounded
door and curving top echoing the shape of the church from which it came;
armchairs with rush seats; and an unusual storage box with a painted
hunting scene.

John Fleming, himself a passionate collector, writes knowledgeably on
these visual and decorative arts, touching many bases and linking the
furniture to the lives and circumstances that gave them birth. James
Chambers’s photographs (some 100, all in color) reveal the warmth and
graciousness of these pieces.

The Painted Furniture ..., a book for social historians, curators, and
all lovers of beautiful things, is a telling revelation of a people and
their way of life.