CIRCA 1770, PARTIALLY LATER MOUNTED IN THE 19TH CENTURY

This encoignure was almost certainly acquired in Paris as one of a pair purchased by the celebrated entrepreneur and patriot Colonel James Swan. One of the Sons of Liberty, he participated in the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, fought in the battle of Bunker Hill during the Revolution and was subsequently a member of the Massachusetts legislature. Colonel Swan travelled to France in 1787 during the years after the fall of the Monarchy, and became a successful merchant and the French government's official agent for buying supplies in America upon his return to Boston in 1794. Swan procured a number of French furnishings that are now part of the Swan Bequest to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Not all of Swan's French furniture has been firmly documented and traced, leaving their early provenance unclear. For example, the partner to this encoignure was untraced until it was sold anonymously at Christie's, New York, 17 November 1999, lot 625 ($51,750). The current encoignure was first recorded as belonging to Swan when Richard Codman illustrated it in his memoirs (R. Codman, Reminiscences, Boston, 1923). While there has been no secure identification of the early history of Swan's pair of encoignures, they were undoubtedly included in one of the Revolutionary sales of either aristocratic property, or that of the Royal Garde-Meuble.