The furniture mounts of P.E. Guerin

Magazine Antiques, May, 2002 by Barbara Laux

By mid-century the New York City furniture trade had developed into a booming industry that offered a wide selection of styles and quality. (13) The high end of the trade was controlled by a minority of French newcomers who produced custom furniture. (14) They successfully interpreted trends from abroad and produced work of the highest quality. The newly rich needed the expertise of these craftsmen to help them decorate their interiors. With the assistance of such firms as Herter Brothers, Leon Marcotte, or Pottier and Stymus, they decorated their newly acquired houses and successfully asserted their social status. (15)

The high-style furniture meant to display the wealth and taste of the owner predominantly filled the drawing and dining rooms. In addition to elaborate marquetry panels and inset porcelain plaques, much of this furniture was accented with bronze mounts. New York City cabinetmakers followed the nineteenth-century French precedent of using mounts to convey revival themes rather than just for protecting vulnerable areas from damage as they had been used in the eighteenth century.

Of the seven account books at P. E. Guerin, three record activity during the tenure of Pierre Guerin from 1864 to 1911 and document the patronage of many high-end furniture producers. The earliest book covers the period January 1864 through December 1865, naming clients who included Edward W Hutchings, Alexander Roux, Kimbel and Cabus, and Julius Dessoir and giving brief lists of their purchases. Subsequent books do not list objects, only the dollar amounts of purchases by firms that include L. Marcotte and Company Pottier and Stymus, and Herts Brothers. Besides these records, documented furniture with Guerin plaques and mounts testifies to the patronage of these cabinetmakers. Significantly Marcotte is the only cabinetmaker dealing with the firm for whom there is a separate box of ornaments labeled with his name in the Guerin pattern room. It is not possible to verify whether or not the contents of the box are original, but the fact that Marcotte had his own box suggests a high level of purchasing from Guer in.

Marcotte favored revivals of French eighteenth-century and Renaissance revival styles. (16) He frequently used lengths of bronze beading to accentuate the frames of chairs or panels of cabinets. An example is the suite of ebonized furniture he made for John Taylor Johnston about 1860. It included a large three-door cabinet and two one-door cabinets (see Figs. 1-3). These are noteworthy for their gilt-bronze moldings and bronze plaques. Two of the plaques (see Figs. 1 and 3) depict a nymph supporting an infant who rides on a satyr, and the third (see Fig. 2) depicts a nymph leaning against a rock and holding a pair of flutes to her mouth with a cherub peaking over her shoulder as a young satyr dances before them. The former matches a model in the Guerin pattern room (Pl. Ill), which, in turn, is clearly related to the plaque on one of the pair of French cabinets of about 1785 (Pl. IV), and is probably derived from the same source. Likewise the plaque on the cabinet in Figure 2 matches a Guerin model and is al so related to the one on the other French cabinet (Pl. V).