Campeche chair

Campeche-style armchair, Villa Kérylos, Alpes-Maritimes, France.

Campeche chair, also known as a "plantation chair," is a type of lounge chair popular in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the American South. Its name comes from the Campeche region of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, which manufactured and exported the chairs in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Great Britain it is called an "X-frame chair," which gives a clue to its structure: two X-shaped sides joined by horizontal rails, with a sling back and seat of leather, cane or wooden slats. Campeches often have attached arms, and sometimes are made into rocking chairs.

Thomas Jefferson owned at least two "Campeachy" armchairs at Monticello,^[1] and had more copied by enslaved woodworker John Hemings.^[2] James Madison owned a Mexican-made Campeche armchair at his plantation Montpelier, which was described as his "favorite seat."^[3]

Examples

• Campeche Chair (circa 1800-10), New Orleans, Louisiana, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

References

1. Virginia Randolph Trist (Jefferson's granddaughter) to her sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge, June 27, 1825, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series Digital Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Quoted in Gontar, Antiques.
2. The gift shop at Monticello sells replicas of a Jefferson "Campeachy."
3. "Madison's Campeche chair returns to Montpelier," Montpelier Staff's blog, 2011.

• Cybèle Trione Gontar, “The Campeche Chair in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, vol. 38 (2003), pp. 183–212.
• Cybèle T. Gontar, "The American Campeche chair," The Magazine Antiques (May 2009).