By 1810, that furniture was changing. French designers now set the style in Europe and, inspired by discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum and by Napoleon’s visit to Egypt in 1798, they had moved beyond classical ornament and were creating original Greco-Roman forms like klismos chairs and curule stools. In the new, “empire” style, shapes were more voluptuous, ormolu mounts more numerous, and imagery shifted from swags and urns to lion’s paws and lyres. Around 1805, cutting-edge American makers like Duncan Phyfe, and Charles Honoré La nnuier, a French émigré who set up shop in New York in 1803, began to make pieces in the new taste and produced neoclassical furniture for two more decades. Once labeled “empire” like their French antecedents, these American pieces are now referred to as “classical.”

All of this classicism can make for some confusion. While most experts date the Federal period from 1790 to 1810, long after big-city artisans like Lannuier and Phyfe were turning out classical pieces, smaller makers and rural craftsmen all over America were still making furniture in the Federal style. “We catalog less according to date and more on what a piece looks like,” says Christie’s American furniture expert Andrew Brunk. “If it was made in 1825 but still has that Sheraton look with reeded legs and Adam motifs, it’s Federal.”