Living with antiques: Millford Plantation in South Carolina

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Thomas Gordon Smith

30 For example, McClelland wrote, "For when Empire and Victorian fashions in furniture came into vogue, Phyfe was forced to follow these ideas. His craftsmanship was still as fine as ever, his woods were still as beautiful, but the bad taste of the designs which he used, in common with all other cabinetmakers of the time, lowered his standing as an artist" (Duncan Phyfe and the English Regency, p. 154).

31 Smith, "John Hall," in John Hall and the Grecian Style in America, p. v.

32 See Marshall B. Davidson and Elizabeth Stillinger, The American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1985), pp. 78-81. To my knowledge the earliest documented piece of plain-style Grecian furniture by Duncan Phyfe is a pier table bought by Benjamin Clark in 1834 (now in the White House in Washington, D.C.; it is illustrated in ANTIQUES, May 1962, p. 516, [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED]).

33 On at least one occasion Phyfe consulted a French design book. The back rail and splat of a set of hair made for the Bloomfield family of New Jersey (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) are taken from Theodore Pasquier, Cahier de Dessins (Paris, c. 1835), Pl. 46.

34 Letter cited in n. 15.

35 Seen. 22.

36 Phyfe and Brother, New York City, to Manning (Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers).

37 Ethyl Wylly Sweet, The Decorative Arts of Camden and Kershaw County, South Carolina (Kershaw County Historical Society, Camden, South Carolina, 1989), p. 54.

38 Cited in n. 29.

THOMAS GORDON SMITH, a practicing architect and the chairman of the School of Architecture of the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, writes about nineteenth-century Grecian architecture in the United States.