The Philadelphia Museum of Art is reassembling, restoring and scrutinizing parlor furniture that scandalized some Philadelphians when it was new.
The suite of gilded chairs, tables and couches was produced in 1808 for the Philadelphia drawing rooms of the merchant William Waln and his wife, Mary Wilcocks Waln, who made fortunes partly in the Chinese opium trade. On the neo-Classical pieces, designed by the British émigré architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a fellow British immigrant, the artist George Bridport, painted petals and griffins.
