Allen and Brother, Philadelphia furniture makers

Magazine Antiques, May, 1996 by Page Talbott

15 The plate from Gems of the Centennial and a discussion of Mitchell and Rammelsberg's contribution to the exhibition can be found in Doreen Bolger Burke et al., In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 1987), pp. 153-154.

16 American furniture makers would have been familiar with the detailed pattern books of Bruce James Talbert (1838-1881), a British designer whose most famous works, Gothic Forms Applied to Furniture, Metal Work and Decoration for Domestic Purposes (Birmingham, England, 1867) and Examples of Ancient and Modern Furniture, Metal Work, Tapestries, Decoration &c. (Birmingham, England, 1876), illustrated furniture in the so-called modern Gothic style. Talbert and his fellow reformer Charles Locke Eastlake (1836-1906) were influenced by craft traditions of the Middle Ages and urged a return to simple and functional lines and honesty of construction. For a concise overview of the style and its American manifestations, see Mary Jean Smith Madigan's introduction to Eastlake-Influenced American Furniture 1870-1890 (Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, 1974).

17 "Renaissance Revival Furniture in America" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1970), pp. 158, 190. An essay on the influence of the French style on Christian

Herter and his contemporaries, by Marc Bascou, is included in Katherine S. Howe, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Catherine Hoover Voorsanger et al., Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1994), pp. 29-35. He illustrates a cabinet made by Charles Guillaume Diehl in 1867, which shares similar proportions and basic design elements with those of the Allen and Brother cabinet shown in Pl. II. For a more complete discussion of the neo-grec styles, see Kenneth L. Ames, "Sitting in (Neo-Grec) Style," Nineteenth Century, Fall 1976, pp. 51-58.

18 See, for example, illustrations in the series of books Le Magasin de meubles, by Victor Louis Quetin. An undated volume of the 1870s (vol. 10) includes as no. 992 an ebony and ivory "Bahut Henri II" with similar decoration, made by a Monsieur Pagny.

19 Ames, "Renaissance Revival Furniture," p. 188.

20 Ibid, p. 190.

21 Illustrated in vol. 20 of Le Magasin de meubles (1870s), Pl. 47, for example, is a drapery on rods with rings and bosses described as a "Croisee Renaissance - Ornemens Bois." The American adaptation of elements of window draping to furniture design originated decades earlier than the Aliens' use of the motif. In Boston, for example, the curtain rod was applied to the Backs of sofa designs by William Hancock (w. 1819-1849), and chairs with carved wood simulating drapery were also popular in that city in the early nineteenth century (see ANTIQUES, May 1991, p. 959).

22 Among the related chairs is a pair illustrated in Peter Hill's advertisement in ANTIQUES, July 1994, p. 8. The sideboard was the quintessential exhibition piece and was commonly featured at world's fairs beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Among the most famous of these creations was the sideboard by the French designer Alexandre Georges Fourdinois, which featured an almost life-sized dead stag, six hunting hounds, numerous statues, and other carvings related to dining. Most major cabinetmakers in the United States began to include this form in their entries to subsequent international exhibitions, including Bulkley and Herter, Kimbel and Cabus, Ringuet Le Prince and Leon Marcotte, and Alexander Roux (see Howe, Frelinghuysen, Voorsanger et al., Herter Brothers, pp. 38-40, 66-67; and Ames, "Renaissance Revival Furniture," pp. 224-252).