Page 8 - Maison Chenal Real Estate and Holden Collection

PREFACE
TOUT ENSEMBLE: Maison Chenal, LaCour House and Holden Collection -PHILIPPE HALBERT- PHD CANDIDATE, YALE DEPARTMENT OF THE HISTORY OF ART
Situated within a bucolic setting of 75 acres including gardens and farmlands in Pointe Coupée Parish, Maison Chenal is the result of nearly a half-century of dedication and stewardship by the Holden family. From its inception, Maison Chenal has been guided by a desire to assemble historic objects in relation to each other and their physical surroundings, a principle affectionately referred to as tout ensemble, meaning all together or all of a part.
Maison Chenal bears witness to Louisiana’s unique cultural heritage and constitutes the single most comprehensive repository of architectural elements, decorative arts, and material culture from the region before 1830. In addition to showcasing pieces made in southern Louisiana, a collection of over 1000 objects reflects the state’s global connections to Canada, Haiti, France, Great Britain, Mexico, Spain, and other countries. Its parameters are equally vast, and extend to cover furniture, ceramics, silver, textiles, tools, paintings, and works on paper of extraordinary local, national, and international significance.
The main house, a raised CREOLE plantation home dubbed Maison Chenal by the Holdens, was built as early as 1790 and remodeled in the early nineteenth century. Maison Chenal stands as a representative example of the kind of vernacular home once common across southern Louisiana. Standing across the road, the LaCour House can be counted among the oldest surviving buildings in the entire Mississippi River Valley, possibly built as early as the 1730s. Scattered across the property are various dependencies and other typical structures, including two smaller homes, a kitchen, and a pigeonnier, as well as carefully planned ornamental and utilitarian gardens.
Maison Chenal is home to one of the most important collections in the world of early Louisiana furniture, much of which was featured in the landmark Historic New Orleans publication Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735- 1835.
At Maison Chenal, twenty-five armoires include examples from Louisiana as well as Canada, France, the French Antilles, and the Upper Mississippi Valley. Measuring twelve feet in length, a walnut table owned by the New Orleans Ursulines is the oldest piece of Louisiana furniture in the collection and believed to have been used in their convent refectory. Stored in some of this historic table’s drawers is silver flatware made for the Ursulines by New Orleans silversmith Jean-Noël Delarue. Another distinctive Louisiana furniture form, the Campeche or butaca chair, is represented by six examples. The exotic elegance of the Campeche chair, inspired by prototypes imported directly from Latin America, is right at home next to the rustic simplicity of the Louisiana slat back chair, a charming form ubiquitous in the period and with nearly forty examples in the Maison Chenal collection.
Looking beyond furniture, the collection at Maison Chenal provides a veritable cross-section of Louisiana art, with oil on canvas and miniature portraits signed by or attributed to Josef de Salazar y Mendoza, Joseph Fourcade, Jean-Joseph Vaudechamp, Louis Antoine Collas, and Jean-François Feuille. Twenty-one paintings are the work of Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter. In addition to that by Delarue, silver in the collection is marked by Louisiana silversmiths such as Pierre Lamothe, Armand Chassagne, and Anthony Rasch. Ceramics range from Rouen faïence and Paris porcelain to English pearlware, transferware, and mochaware as well as Spanish olive jars. Over 170 traditional Acadian textiles — quilts, sheets, coverlets, and clothing — are complemented by an
Certainly, architecture is an integral component of the collection at Maison Chenal, where a complex of dwellings and outbuildings come together to create a distinct, largely vanished cultural landscape.
MAISON CHENAL LACOUR HOUSE HOLDEN COLLECTION PAGE 8