Allen and Brother, Philadelphia furniture makers

Magazine Antiques, May, 1996 by Page Talbott

23 Gems of the Centennial, p. 144.

24 (London, 1856). While he admittedly based his generalizations on limited evidence, such as "a few fragments of painted brick" and some objects of bronze, Jones spoke disparagingly of the "Assyrian" style, writing that "while the general arrangement of the subject and the pose of the single figure were still conventional, an attempt was made to express the muscles of the limbs and the rotundity of the flesh; in all art this is a symptom of decline, Nature should be idealised not copied" (p. 29).

25 One of the sofas is illustrated in Howe, Frelinghuysen, Voorsanger et al., Herter Brothers, p. 140, Pl. 7. The Lockwood house is now called the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum.

26 Similarly grotesque creatures can be found in French furniture of the Francis I period (1483-1547), when chimerae, draped human figures, and stylized scrolls were popular motifs.

27 One chair from the suite is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The departmental files note that the suite was sold at Freeman's Fine Arts Auction in Philadelphia in 1982, and that apparently it had been acquired locally in the 1930s by a Philadelphia antiques dealer ("Notes on Renaissance Revival Lady's Chair, Acc. #83.59," April 7, 1783, Department of Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).

28 Howe, Frelinghuysen, Voorsanger et al., Herter Brothers, p. 30. An interesting comparison to the Allen center table is an example made by Herter Brothers, c. 1869-1870, in the Toledo Museum of Art, in Toledo, Ohio, which is related to a lost table made for the drawing room of Elm Park (ibid., p. 142, Pl. 8).

29 Often-cited examples of furniture in this style on view at the Centennial Exhibition were the cabinets designed by the English architect Thomas Edward Collcutt (1840-1924) for Collinson and Lock of London. "No less an authority than Mr. Eastlake" considered "Messrs. Collinson and Locks" cabinets to be among the most "skillful and artistic" of any made in Britain. "They cannot be said to belong to any style, and are in no way borrowed from the past, although thoroughly of the old English in manner" (see Gems of the Centennial, pp. 96-97). Documented examples of furniture in the Eastlake style by Philadelphia makers is rare; one example is a chest of drawers, c. 1880, by A. and H. Lejambre in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. More numerous are examples documented to New York makers.

30 The bedroom suite, complete with the original lace curtains and blue damask curtains, is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The bed and chest of drawers are illustrated in Oscar P. Fitzgerald, Three Centuries of American Furniture: An Illustrated Survey of Furniture from Colonial Times to the Present Day (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1982), Figs. XII-8 and XII-14. Kennerdell's furniture was inherited by his granddaughter, Mary Kennerdell Royer of Franklin, Pennsylvania, from whom it passed to her collateral descendant Charles W. Holton of Essex Fells, New Jersey, who in turn gave it to the National Museum of American History.