The Neat and Plain Style in the Low Country
Although much of the furniture made in Charleston, South Carolina, during the third quarter of the eighteenth century was elaborate, a large body of more restrained wares reveals Charlestonians' equally strong taste for the British-inspired neat and plain taste then so popular in the Chesapeake. When wealthy Charlestonian Peter Manigault ordered furniture and silver from London in 1771, he emphasized that the goods be “the plainer the better so that they are fashionable.”