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Pierced Decorative Metalwork from the Deanery

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Image of Pierced Decorative Metalwork from the Deanery

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Bookmark: http://triarte.brynmawr.edu/objects-1/info/184322



Designed by
Lockwood de Forest
American (1850 - 1932) Primary

Manufactured by
Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company
Indian Manufacturer



Pierced Decorative Metalwork from the Deanery

ca. 1908
Brass

8 1/8 in. x 12 3/4 in. (20.64 cm x 32.39 cm)

Bryn Mawr College
Accession Number: 2012.4.6.t
Acquisition Date: 1935
Geography: North and Central America and Asia, United States and India
Classification: Furnishings and Furniture; Wall Coverings
Culture/Nationality: American design; Indian manufacture
Collection: Deanery Collection
Description: Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932) was an American-born artist who is most well-known for his landscape painting and interior design, as well as for his partnership with Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Associated Artists in New York. As a young man he travelled frequently with his family, touring Europe, North Africa, and parts of the Middle East before the age of 25, but his greatest interest was in the decorative arts of Eastern India. De Forest spent many years in Ahmedabad overseeing a workshop where craftsmen produced carved furniture, tracery panels, jewelry, and textiles for export to New York City.

These pieces of decorative metalwork, in rectangular, paisley, and “peacock” designs, were installed between the exposed beams of the ceiling in M. Carey Thomas’s sitting room, known as the Dorothy Vernon Room. The room was modeled after one in Haddon Hall, Derbyshire, England, which Thomas had visited numerous times while she was a student, traveling in Europe. De Forest designed the room as a mixture of English and East Indian design, although Japanese teakwood tables and Tiffany lamps were used in the room as well. After the Deanery was razed in 1968, a new Dorothy Vernon Room was installed in Haffner Hall, about a quarter size of the original room, where many of the stencils, furniture, and other furnishings were re-located.

De Forest began producing brass stencils like these in 1881, using a pattern book supplied by the director of his Ahmedabad workshop, Mr. Muggenbhai Hutheesing. The workshop produced close to 200 different filigree designs, continuing after 1889 under the direction of Hutheesing’s two sons.

The production of gold and tin foil was a prosperous industry in nineteenth-century Ahmedabad, where it was used to decorate the doorways of houses for weddings and celebrations. The pierced brass foils cut by The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company were a cheaper and more permanent alternative to luxurious and ephemeral gold; as such, they were ordered in the tens-of-thousands. De Forest repeatedly refers to the pierced brass foils as “stencils” even when they were not used to apply paint. Instead, the brass itself was attached to furniture and architectural features. This decorative metalwork is still visible between the ceiling beams of the Dorothy Vernon Room in its current iteration in New Dorm Dining Hall.


Keywords Click a term to view the records with the same keyword
This object has the following keywords:
  • decoration - The process of embellishing architecture, furniture, or other objects. In reference to specific forms of decoration, such as fluting, finials, or monograms, that embellish and are part of the building or object, but are not structurally essential to it, use "ornaments"
  • metal - Any of a large group of substances that typically show a characteristic luster, are good conductors of electricity and heat, are opaque, can be fused, and are usually malleable or ductile.
  • metalwork - Visual works that are the products of working any kind of metal, particularly metal objects of artistic merit.

Additional Images Click an image to view a larger version
Additional Image 2012.4.6.t_BMC_f_2.jpg
2012.4.6.t_BMC_f_2.jpg

Exhibition List
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Bibliography List
The following Bibliography exist for this object:
  • Brian Wallace and Joelle Collins. "Conversations," Mirabile Dictu: The Bryn Mawr College Library Newsletter 15 (Fall 2012): 11.

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<ref name=BMC>cite web |url=http://triarte.brynmawr.edu/objects-1/info/184322 |title=Pierced Decorative Metalwork from the Deanery |author=Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections |accessdate=3/28/2024 |publisher=Bryn Mawr College</ref>

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