Gustave and Christian Herter: the European connection - furniture designers

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1994 by Katherine S. Howe

Recent research(1) has shown that the work of the respected New York City furniture makers and decorators Gustave and Christian Herter was strongly influenced by in Europe, reflecting the emerging cosmopolitanism of affluent Americans who demanded goods like those they saw when they traveled abroad or at the international fairs. The Herters' associations with Germany, France, and then England encourage scholars to reconsider high-style late nineteenth-century American furniture and interiors in an international perspective.

The Herters were born in Stuttgart in the German kingdom of Wurttemberg. Gustave was baptized Julius Gustav Alexander Hagenlocher,(2) his unmarried mother's surname. Johanna Christiana Maria Barbara Hagenlocher married Christian Herter (1807-1874) in 1835, and sometime thereafter he adopted Gustav Hagenlocher. The couple's son Christian Augustus Ludwig Herter was born in 1839.

The elder Christian Herter was an ebenist, which in Wurttemberg signified a cabinetmaker who was skilled in making case pieces decorated with veneer, marquetry, or inlay.(3) Although the guild system in Germany was weakening, the Herters honored the tradition that the sons of master craftsmen follow their fathers into the trade. Based on their furniture, Gustave and Christian were well schooled in a woodworking environment that valued superior training and craftsmanship.

Gustave Herter came to New York City in 1848, a year of political and economic turmoil in Germany that resulted in a wave of emigration. Many of the German immigrants were highly trained craftsmen from Bavaria, Baden, and Wurttemberg who soon dominated the New York City furniture trades,(4) and between 1855 and 1880 the city was the third largest German-speaking community in the world after Vienna and Berlin.(5)

When Gustave Herter renounced his Wurttemberg citizenship on June 29, 1850, he called himself Gustav Julius Alexander Herter and identified himself as a bildhauer (sculptor).(6) He seems almost immediately to have entered the ratified world of the finest furniture shops in New York City, which were then located on lower Broadway and dominated by Americans such as Edward W. Hutchings (w. c. 1836-1856) and Frenchmen such as Alexander Roux (w. 1837-1881).(7) According to the directories, Herter's first documented professional presence in New York City was a partnership between 1851 and 1853 with Auguste Pottier (1823-1896), a French immigrant cabinetmaker. Based on a surviving trade card and illustrations of furniture in use in Stuttgart in the 1850's, Gustave was already conversant with current French rococo revival furniture. In 1853 he designed a bookcase, an etagere, and a buffet for the exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York City.(8) The robust, Renaissance-style buffet was clearly inspired by the sumptuously carved example by Alexandre Georges Fourdinois at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, which Gustave Herter probably knew through an illustration. Herter's buffet was designed for the partnership of Bulkley and Herter (1853-1858) and carved by Ernst Plassmann, an emigrant from the Prussian province of Westphalia. As early as 1854 Bulkley and Herter were said to "have a manufactory in Paris, as goods are often consigned to them from thence."(9)

Turning to France for designs became a common practice for the Herters. Indeed, German craftsmen had long looked to Paris for design sources.(10) Ludwigsburg Palace (begun 1704) and the Villa Berg (1845-1853), both near Stuttgart, are just two examples of projects inspired by French prototypes, and it was at Villa Berg that Gustave Herter is said to have worked before emigrating.(11)

In addition to their familiarity with French design, the brothers were clearly literate men who relied on publications to keep them abreast of the latest European trends. There are even indications that they maintained a library of design sources.(12) While Gustave Herter operated under his own name from 1858 to 1864, some of his work was similar to or influenced by Fourdinois's. A rosewood armchair he made about 1860 for Ruggles Sylvester Morse is strikingly similar to a Fourdinois chair exhibited at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris(13) and indicates at the very least that both makers were turning to the same sources at the time. About 1860 Herter introduced the first of a series of center tables with fine marquetry tops decorated with complex patterns of birds, flowers, and wreaths.(14) The tops, which sit like trays on typical Herter frames, are more closely related to French marquetry than to documented American products of the period. This leads one to deduce that Herter, and perhaps other New York City furniture makers, imported at least some of their fine marquetry from Paris.

Before coming to America Christian Herter is said to have studied at Stuttgart Polytechnical School and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but his name does not appear in the records of either school.(15) In any event, he was in New York City by 1859, when he renounced his Wurttemberg citizenship,(16) and in 1864 he joined his brother in the firm thenceforth known as Herter Brothers.(17) He applied for a passport in 1867 on the day he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.(18) His destination was most probably Paris, the site of the Exposition Universelle celebrating the achievements of the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1808-1873). Certainly Herter Brothers paid homage to Second Empire interpretations of Renaissance architecture and ornament in the interiors it created at Elm Park in Norwalk, Connecticut; Happy House, built between 1869 and 1871 by Darius Ogden Mills (1825-1910) in Millbrae, California; and Thurlow Lodge in Menlo Park, California.(19)