Cast Iron Furniture and All Other Forms of Iron Furniture. - book reviews

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1997 by Alfred Mayor

By his own account it has taken Georg Himmelheber more than fifteen years to complete the research for this book about cast-iron furniture. He begins with a third-century Roman folding chair and ends, 418 illustrations later, with a spring armchair made in New York in 1872. The preponderance of surviving cast-iron furniture dates from the nineteenth century and was made in England and Scotland "partly due to the fact that the British iron industry was much more advanced than the rest of Europe, and partly...if not mainly - to the fact that in Britain nineteenth-century artifacts were not destroyed with such enthusiasm as on the Continent."

Since a piece of furniture could be reproduced ad infinitum by making sand-casts of its components, models were shamelessly borrowed wherever there was a market. While the virtues of such mass production fascinated designers such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Germany and Christopher Dresser in England, who contributed substantially to cast-iron furniture design, the arts and crafts and art nouveau philosophers were dead against it. They favored only wrought iron, which is shaped into unique examples by the individual craftsman.

Nonetheless, since iron is ubiquitous, strong, and durable, the nature of the castings made during its time of popularity were limited only by the imagination. It was immediately apparent that iron was the perfect material for beds since there were no nooks and crannies for bugs. Chairs, both fixed and adjustable, park benches, church pews, cradles, every sort of table, umbrella stand- coat rack combinations, and potted plant stands were all cast with built-in decoration appropriate to the fashion of the day.

The author writes with magisterial authority for he was formerly a curator at the Bayerisches National museum in Munich and has long been an authority on many aspects of European furniture.