Don't dismiss Mr. Jelliff, please - response to article by Anna D'Ambrosio in the May 1999 issue of Antiques - furniture maker John Jelliff and Co. of Newark - Letter to the Editor

Magazine Antiques, August, 1999 by Ulysses Grant Dietz

Ulysses Grant Dietz, the curator of decorative arts at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, has written us in response to an article in our May issue that brought to light the work of two American mass producers of high-style furniture in the late nineteenth century - M. and H. Schrenkeisen and Kilian Brothers, both of New York City.(1) In the article Anna Tobin D'Ambrosio put forth the thesis that the Schrenkeisen firm had actually made a number of pieces of Renaissance revival furniture that have heretofore been attributed to John Jelliff and Company of Newark. Since Mr. Dietz has an especial interest in Jelliff one of Newark's important furniture makers, he quite understandably wanted to make sure that readers do not start reattributing all similar furniture to Schrenkeisen. He writes:

My friend and colleague Anna D'Ambrosio's article and Christie's subsequent attribution of a suite of furniture to Martin and Henry Schrenkeisen have compelled me to submit this cautionary note, for the existing evidence does not necessarily support this conclusion.(2) Ultimately, the most important evidence in this discussion are the photographs in the two surviving Schrenkeisen catalogues. When I first encountered these in the Winterthur Museum archives in Winterthur, Delaware, in 1984, I was struck by the Jelliff-like parlor suite pictured, particularly the fact that this furniture was of a distinctly higher caliber than the bulk of what Schrenkeisen was offering. I concluded then, and maintain still, that Schrenkeisen must have been a wholesale outlet for Jelliff.

D'Ambrosio's premise that Jelliff retailed Schrenkeisen's furniture reiterates the view of Charles L. Venable, who attributed a suite of furniture in the Dallas Museum of Art's Bybee Collection to the Schrenkeisen firm based on photographs in the surviving Schrenkeisen catalogues.(3) A careful comparison of the suites in the Dallas Museum with very similar pieces in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art in Utica, New York, the Newark Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City led D'Ambrosio to conclude that they were all produced by the same maker. Up to this point we are in complete agreement.

But I take issue with two of D'Ambrosio's statements. On page 732 she says, "According to Schrenkeisen's price lists and catalogues, the firm limited its dealings to the wholesale market and consequently is highly unlikely to have bought furniture from Jelliff." In fact, a large manufacturing firm that deals only at the wholesale level is exactly the sort of company to look around for smaller specialty manufacturers in order to expand their offerings to a national marketplace. And, conversely, Schrenkeisen is just the sort of big player to whom John Jelliff would have looked in trying to expand the market for his high-end parlor suites. His firm was too small to produce trade catalogues and undertake the aggressive nationwide marketing that Schrenkeisen could afford.

The Schrenkeisen brothers' own assertion that "we keep no goods but those of our own manufacture, which we get up for the trade only"(4) should only be viewed as advertising hyperbole. After all, if they had discovered a wonderful furniture maker in Newark, who could provide them with top-notch parlor suites at less cost than they could make them themselves (or indeed would want to since they were mass producers), then why would they want their customers to go directly to Jelliff and thus eliminate their profits as middleman?

D'Ambrosio also writes, "in 1870 Schrenkeisen had twice as many workers as Jelliff and a reported annual production worth $200,000 as opposed to $75,000 for Jelliff," and concludes that all the parlor suites were "more than likely made by Schrenkeisen, and perhaps some of them were retailed by Jelliff." This logic too seems counterintuitive to me. Just because one firm is twice the size of another (by 1874 Jelliff reported an annual product of $100,0005) in no way means that it wouldn't want to augment its product line with the output of smaller firms. Indeed, it is well documented, for example, that Tiffany and Company routinely turned to small- scale jewelry manufacturers in Newark for a substantial part of its inventory.

All the attributions of Renaissance revival furniture to Jelliff are based either on very early Newark family traditions or to two groups of furniture documented by billheads or copies of them (in the Newark Museum archives). One of these is the parlor armchair shown in Plate II, which belonged to a suite in the Pompadour style purchased by Jelliff's daughter Phebe Jelliff LeMassena in 1869. Of course, she could have purchased Schrenkeisen parlor furniture from her father's store, but if so, what in heavens name was Jelliff making? According to the products of industry census of 1860, Jelliff and Company produced 150 sofas, 600 chairs, and 280 tables in that year.(6) We know that by 1859 he was designing seating furniture in the Renaissance revival style [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED], and many of his drawings of parlor furniture in this style from the 1850s and 1860 survive.(7) One [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED] shows a one-back settee similar to one in Schrenkeisen's catalogue, and several depict the portions of tripartite back known on Jelliff sofas of the period [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1, 2, AND 4 OMITTED]. What seems truly unlikely to me is that Jelliff was producing parlor suites in this style in his own factory and then buying highly similar suites from a large New York wholesaler.