Here is a name I wish surfaced in listings as often as it earned to: Charles Baudouine. When the old New York cabinetmaker Ernest Hagen — who had worked in the shop himself — looked back at the trade, he flatly called Baudouine “the leading cabinetmaker of New York.” This was a man running a Broadway establishment of roughly two hundred hands, seventy of them cabinetmakers, whose showroom a guidebook in 1852 listed as one of the city's sights. And yet a collector today can go years without ever seeing a piece confidently called his.
Part of that is his own doing. Baudouine seldom labeled his furniture, and around 1856 — at the height of it — he simply closed the shop and turned to Manhattan real estate, where the money turned out to be even better; he died in 1895 leaving a fortune and a Broadway building that still carries his name. He left the workshop before the labeled, exhibition-piece era that makes a maker easy to pin down later. So the output scattered into the general pool of “fine New York rosewood,” and the trade's lazy shorthand for fine New York rosewood is, of course, Belter.
The confusion isn't baseless — the two really did overlap. Hagen's own recollection is that Baudouine got sideways with John Henry Belter over Belter's patent for laminated chair backs, and dodged it by building his curved backs in two pieces with a seam up the center instead of one continuous laminated panel. That's not a slur; it's a tell. On a pierced, curved-back Rococo chair, a center seam in the lamination is a reason to think harder before you say Belter, not less. The sofa above, at the Art Institute of Chicago and attributed to him, is the kind of ambitious laminated-mahogany Rococo that shows why the two names get tangled in the first place.
My practical advice: treat Baudouine as a live possibility, not a footnote. When a strong New York Rococo piece comes up with a triple-arched or pierced back and no label, resist the reflex. The honest catalog line is “New York, Rococo Revival, laminated rosewood” — and if you're going to reach for a name on quality alone, Baudouine deserves to be in the conversation next to Belter and Meeks, not left out of it. His work carries the money, too: attributed Baudouine seating has cleared $4,000 at Neal Auction in New Orleans, and a set of his chairs once brought $16,100.
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