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LOUISIANA STUDIES
Summer
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Figure 4; Seignouret chair
1962
FRENCH CABINETMAKERS
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Prudent Mallard was born in Sevres, France, in 1809. His father, an Edinburgh Scot, was Sir Peter Nicholas Mallard, and his mother, a French woman, was the Lady Michael Louise Oger. Prudent Mallard studied cabinetmaking and design in Paris, and when he was twenty came to America. Settling in New York in 1829 with two intimates that had made the journey with him (the Bavarian Count von Mussinan, founder of the Faber pencil factory, and the Maillard of chocolate fame),? he worked with Duncan Phyfe, but removed to New Orleans shortly after. Ronstrom contends that Mallard moved because "the climate proved too severe for his asthma,"7 but it is possible that something else drew him to New Orleans--the French-speaking populace, perhaps, or the possibility of a bountiful business venture in furnishing the mansions of the affluent Creole planters.
Still in his twenties, Mallard established in 1838 a furniture factory on the then fashionable Royal Street between St. Philip and Ursulines. He moved eight -blocks nearer Canal Street in 1841, locating near the corner of Bienville Street at the present site of 301,	305, and 307 Royal Street. Be-
fore the Civil War Mallard spent six months of the year in his residence next door to his business, and the remaining months in Paris. Mallard's later residence is as equally famous as the"Maison Seignouret." The inspiration for George Washington Cable's "Sieur George's House," it is located at 640 Royal, and is called the "first skyscraper in New Orleans." Mallard died here in 187 9 at the age of seventy. Before his death Mallard had owned a large import-export business, exporting to England in his own ships, and importing mahogany and rosewood from South and Central America.
Mallard began manufacturing furniture sixteen years after Seignouret ' s shop opened on Royal Street. His work, still extant in abundance, does not exhibit as fine a craftsmanship as does the earlier and scarcer work of Seignouret. Mallard's descendants claim that he was responsible for the introduction of the "Victoria bed" in Louisiana, but this claim would be as difficult to authenticate as the similar claim of Seignouret's "first" introduction of the