Charles A. Baudoine Furniture

RECORDED: cf. Anna Tobin D’Ambrosio, ed., Masterpieces of American Furniture from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (Syracuse University Press, Utica, New York, 1999), pp. 85, 86, 87 illus. the Munson-Williams-Proctor tables // cf. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 19th Century America–Furniture and Other Decorative Arts (1970), exhib. cat., [n.p.] no.133 This table is identical to a pair of card tables bearing the stenciled label of Charles A. Baudouine of 335 Broadway, New York, which were acquired by James and Helen Munson Williams of Utica, New York, in May 1852 for their home, Fountain Elms, which is where they remain today as part of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute collection. The Williams tables were billed as “1 Rosewood Multiform Table” at $160 for the pair, and they were indeed “multiform” in that they could be used separately and folded as a pair of console tables, opened as a pair of card tables, or joined together as a center table. The present table varies essentially in the fact that it does not include the mechanism that would have allowed it to be attached to another to form a center table. Of French descent, Baudouine was born in New York in 1808. He made his debut as a cabinetmaker in the New York directory of 1829/30, where he is listed at 508 Pearl Street. By 1839/40 he relocated to Broadway, where he remained in business at various addresses until about 1854. A sense of the scale of Baudouine’s operation is given by German immigrant cabinetmaker Ernest Hagen...