Vaulting Ambition: Gothic Revival in Phila. 1830-1860
2005 Loan Exhibit

This essay and exhibition are dedicated to Peter L.L. Strickland.

The Gothic style dominated the architecture of Europe between 1100 and about 1500 A.D. It was, basically, an architectural style, wherein the slender masonry of the walls and the vaults was embellished with lancet windows, moldings, paneling, tracery, ribs, leafage, crockets, and pinnacles. Largely forgotten during the Renaissance, the Gothic began to be revived during the mid-eighteenth century.

Scholarly interest in early architecture brought knowledge of Gothic structure and ornament to a high level. The rarity of surviving Gothic furniture was commonly acknowledged, but as the literary and architectural study of Gothic gained momentum, an equally strong impulse to apply Gothic motifs to furniture and other media overcame academic scruples. A desire for Gothic surroundings was reinforced by the Romantic Movement, which saw in the remote Middle Ages a deep wellspring of fantasy. As a cultural center during the nineteenth century, Philadelphia naturally participated in the Gothic taste. The objects seen here are evidence for this.

This is not the first study of Philadelphia's Gothic Revival furniture and other decorative arts. The heyday of American Gothic Revival studies was the 1970s and 1980s. Katherine S. Howe and David B. Warren mounted a major exhibition and catalog, “The Gothic Revival Style in America, 1830-1870,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1976. In addition, nineteenth-century Philadelphia furniture history experienced a flowering.

Notable scholars like David A. Hanks, Elizabeth Page Talbott, Robert C. Smith, Jane B. Davies, Donald L. Fennimore, Kenneth L. Ames, and Peter L. L. Strickland published important articles that established the existing canon for furniture makers and documented objects. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, a series of academic theses and dissertations by Elizabeth Page Talbott, Deborah Ducoff-Barone, and Charles Venable opened up the broader perspective of the city's nineteenth-century production and the artisans who made the furniture.

All these studies brought to light a small body of Philadelphia Gothic Revival furniture, including the famous bedstead and seating furniture at “Andalusia,” Nicholas Biddle’s estate north of the city on the Delaware River, and a magnificent bedroom suite made in 1844 under the supervision of Crawford Riddell and formerly at the plantation, “Rosedown,” in St. Francisville, Louisiana. As this exhibition will demonstrate, a great number of new examples have appeared over the last twenty years which display strong regional characteristics and which are distinct from New York City production.

Why furniture historians lost interest during the 1980s and 1990s in the city's Gothic Revival furniture dating after the late classicism of Anthony Quervelle and before the Reform Gothic of Frank Furness and Daniel Pabst is not entirely clear. Philadelphia supported great architects who designed town houses, churches, and other structures in Center City and suburban villas in Germantown and on the eastern shore of the Delaware as far north as the Delaware Water Gap. Among these architects were William Thornton, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, William Strickland, John Haviland, Thomas U. Walter, John Notman, Samuel Sloan, Napoleon LeBrun, and John McArthur, Jr.

John Notman (1810-1865) was especially prominent as one of the earliest practitioners of the Ecclesiological Gothic style in the United States. He built the Italianate villa, “Riverside," and the Chapel of the Holy Innocents for Bishop George Washington Doane (1799-1859) in Burlington, New Jersey, during a short period in the late 1830s and early 1840s when Ecclesiological church architecture and the Anglo-Catholic liturgy were controversial among conservative Episcopalians. Bishop Doane was an early follower of the Oxford Movement and also had ties with the Cambridge Camden Society. He and his allies in New Jersey did little to smooth over the turmoil created by their innovations, including such blatantly High Church poetry as this quote from the poem “Evensong at Burlington”:

Bright beams the moon o'er Delaware
As twilight fades away,
And lends the wave more beauty far
Than it had known by day;
On the sweet shore, the flakes of light
Stream down in silvery shower,
And kiss the cross on Riverside,
And crown our lady's tower.

This sort of poetry, with its boilerplate “Gothick” imagery and daring references to venerating the cross and to the cult of the Virgin Mary, were provocative to a broad range of Americans, as was Bishop Doane's flamboyant personality and lifestyle. His villa on the Delaware River included a magnificent Gothic Revival library. Unfortunately, it was demolished in 1961, despite the best efforts of Jonathan L. Fairbanks and others to save it.

More significant than Doane's villa, however, was the transplantation of mature Gothic Revival architecture to the Philadelphia area and its gradual acceptance by a wider audience of religious groups and persons of an artistic and literary persuasion. Many Americans still harbored lingering suspicion of anything European, especially an architectural style associated with the Roman Catholic faith. Only powerful Romantic literary efforts, like the novels of Sir Walter Scott, made such things palatable.

Several other factors impinge on the discussion of Gothic Revival furniture. A sustained interest in technological advances in nineteenth-century furniture production and design has revealed that little of the best furniture was made using machinery, other than at the level of stock preparation and sawing sheets of veneer. Mechanizing high-quality joinery or cabinetwork and carved embellishment is not cost-effective when producing small numbers of custom objects, because the labor savings are offset by the time required to produce jigs and other regulating devices.

However, certain motifs of Gothic Revival furniture lent themselves to being roughed out with mechanized routers, notably the cove moldings of “sunk work,” that is, blind panels with cusps, and of openwork tracery. In theory, sunk work was, as the name implies, carved from the solid, but in practice the raised portions of sunk work panels often were cut out and applied over a veneered substrate.

The centers of the applied panels were cut out on a band saw or with a hand-held coping saw. The inside edges of the centers were carved with cove moldings that could be executed with hand-held gouges, but were often routed out by manipulating the panel on a bed under a fixed overhead router.

It seems unlikely that a movable overhead router with a cove-shaped bit would have been passed over work on a fixed bed at this early date. Demonstrating that routers of any kind were used on Philadelphia furniture of the 1830-1860 period is difficult from examination of the objects alone, because the work was cleaned up with hand-held tools and abrasives after initial shaping. Also, most blind panels and some open tracery panels have cusps ornamented with points, trefoils, or flowers that protrude beyond the cove molding. The fine points of wood required to carve these ornaments might be marred by routers, which cannot be readily run in or out of the work.

Given the prevalence of sunk work in furniture in the Gothic Revival style, such technological factors are not merely of antiquarian interest. Many commentators criticized the Gothic Revival style because the carving was considered too expensive. John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) wrote in his 1833 An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture:

The Designs for Gothic Furniture which we shall submit are few; because such designs are, in general, more expensive to execute than those for modern [that is, late Classical] furniture; partly for the greater quantity of work in them, but chiefly because modern workmen are unaccustomed to this kind of workmanship.

Thomas Webster and Frances Byerley Parkes, co-authors in the 1830s of An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy, were even more vehement in their condemnation of the Gothic style:

We omit chairs in the Gothic style, as they are never used, except the house itself be in the same style; and we may observe that this style is, in general, very ill adapted for domestic furniture, and except it be designed by artists of great taste, and who are very well acquainted with Gothic architecture, and what little remains of ancient furniture, attempts at imitation are generally very miserable, besides being extremely expensive.

These critiques by writers of domestic economy manuals seem forced. The authors may have disliked the style for other reasons, perhaps because it retained connotations of aristocratic snobbery or extravagance. Nor was Gothic carving any harder to execute than Classical foliage, once the patterns became established in the cabinetmaking repertoire. It was not uncommon for architects to provide extremely detailed, full-scale working drawings of carving for contractors to follow.

Another point of interest regarding Philadelphia Gothic Revival furniture is the large number of French and German artisans working in the Philadelphia furniture industry in the 1830-1860 period. The assumption has been that these artisans and entrepreneurs were swiftly assimilated into Anglo-American design traditions, but this idea, aside from being chauvinistic and intellectually slack, is not borne out by various kinds of evidence.

For example, the taste for objects veneered in pale native woods was praised in reviews of furniture displays at the Franklin Institute as “patriotic.” However, this aspect of design stemmed from the French bois claire (pale or light-colored veneer) taste of the Empire period, which persisted into the 1850s and influenced Biedermeier taste in Central Europe and the Baltic.

One must, it is true, give due recognition to the sustained popularity in Philadelphia of Classical, Egyptian, and Gothic designs published by the English designer George Smith (1782-1869) in 1808, 1812, and 1826, as well as the works of the French designers Charles Percier (1764-1838), Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853), and Pierre de la Mésangère (1761-1831). Nevertheless, one must also recognize that French and German design periodicals of the 1830-1860 period contain Gothic Revival designs that are lively and historically accurate, perhaps as a result of the Ecclesiological movement in England, perhaps not.

Increasingly, the scholarly literature of nineteenth-century interior design stresses interaction among English, French, and German sources, and artisans born and trained on the Continent kept abreast of the latest stylistic advances after moving to Philadelphia. Some of the Continental artisan/entrepreneurs who became owners of large cabinetmaking firms were the Frenchmen Anthony G. Quervelle, Michel Bouvier, and Alphonse Lejambre, and the Germans Adolphus Hoehling, David and George Klauder, Michael Deginter, Daniel Pabst, and Gottlieb Vollmer. This exhibition presents some new design and construction information about objects displaying extensive Continental influence.

Still another question concerns the degree to which standards formulated in architectural criticism are appropriate for furniture history, even though it is clear that some Philadelphia architects designed furniture. In discussions of American furniture, the history of Gothic Revival architecture has been redacted for use in a decorative arts topic. According to this model, the first phase of the Gothic Revival, the Rococo Gothic, encompasses English furniture made for Horace Walpole’s villa, “Strawberry Hill,” and a similar villa, “Lee Priory,” that was designed by James Wyatt, as well as the Gothic detailing seen in furniture by Thomas Chippendale, Ince and Mayhew, and John Linnell. This phase is deemed to be frivolous and decorative in intent, without any genuine appreciation of Gothic structure.

The second phase is the Regency Gothic of 1800-1830, including designs by George Smith, Richard Bridgens, and Augustus Charles Pugin (1762-1832). This furniture, too, is dismissed as Classical forms overlaid with Gothic ornament. The third phase is the Reform Gothic, thought to date from Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s first severe or “structural” designs of 1835 until about 1880, although it does not begin in the United States until after the Civil War. In other words, Reform Gothic is thought of as reformed because Pugin rejected the decorative design practice of his father's generation and introduced accurate interpretations based on period furniture and on historical Gothic structures.

But there is more to it than that. Pugin's importance resides not so much in historical accuracy, but in his assertions regarding the relative priority of structure and ornament. This complex topic can be summarized with two quotations, one from Pugin's father and one from Pugin himself.

In 1828, Augustus Charles Pugin published an anthology of his designs previously published in The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics, edited by the publisher Rudolph Ackerman (1764-1834). Regarding an impressive design for a camelback sofa carved all over with sunk work panels and tracery, the elder Pugin stated:

This piece of furniture, in which the modern form is preserved, is embellished according to the style of the thirteenth century; or rather, the parts are adapted from Gothic tracery executed at that period, so as to combine the peculiar features of Gothic art with the form that is now considered to afford the best accommodation for its purpose.

Note that the elder Pugin did not state that the design constituted a Classical form overlaid with Gothic ornament. That interpretation of Regency Gothic has been repeated so often that it is accepted as a truism. In fact, no such thing as “Classical” furniture was made from 1790 to 1840, save for a restricted category of chairs, couches, and tables.

Nineteenth-century designers were aware that few furniture forms in use in the 1820s were archeologically-correct revivals of Egyptian, Greek, or Roman prototypes. The artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and the ébeniste Georges Jacob (1739-1814) had exhausted the possibilities of an archeological approach in Paris in the 1780s, as had Roman designers in the 1500s.

Designers of the 1820s also knew that the few surviving pieces of Gothic furniture or period depictions of furniture in illuminated manuscripts were too limited in scope or too “ecclesiastical” for use in modern decoration. The elder Pugin's flexible approach was not based on ignorance of or disdain for Gothic prototypes. He had built his career by publishing comprehensive fieldwork on French, Belgian, and English Gothic architecture. That was when his son, who was a child prodigy, learned the fundamentals of Gothic architecture and interior design.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) began his career in his father's studio, designing furniture and other fixtures in much the same vein as his father. In the years after his father's death, Pugin converted to Roman Catholicism and asserted the primacy of Gothic architecture as “Christian” and the only appropriate style for all buildings. His new attitude towards structure and ornament sounds very much like positivist notions later current among French architects and critics like Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879). In his 1841 polemic, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, Pugin set forth what is now widely regarded as the first clarion call for Modernism:

The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.

The claim that Pugin hereby announced the existence of a Reform Gothic aesthetic requires qualification. Pugin led an entire generation of architects in rediscovering the essential compositional strategies and technics of English Gothic architecture, but his furniture designs do not all adhere to the hard-line tenet cited above. His post-1835 “structural” designs for tables and some chairs are based on combinations of straight and curved members abstracted from roof trusses. Ornament is restricted to minor carving and chamfering. Still, one could argue that these designs were austere because they were intended for use in schools, rectories, monasteries, and convents. (It is no coincidence that generations of Englishmen who attended “public schools” associated the Gothic style with being trapped in unpleasant circumstances.

Pugin's furniture for international exhibitions, the Houses of Parliament, or wealthy clients is grandiose and heavily ornamented. Clearly Pugin’s factor of “propriety” covered a host of options, not simply the stripped-down objects that appeal to modern architectural critics. One could assert that, for all Pugin's violent and often sophomoric rhetoric, the severe designs are still decorative in intent – compositions wherein a major structural element is reduced to the status of a motif. Over-engineering, in short, is merely another form of expressionism.

Pugin's undoubted importance in England is paralleled by the priority assigned to Alexander Jackson Davis (1803-1892) in the United States. Davis was a major exponent of Gothic Revival architecture and of creative spatial applications in rural houses, and his abundant surviving furniture at “Lyndhurst” in Tarrytown, New York, and from other houses has always received considerable attention.

Indeed, Davis has overshadowed all other American designers of Gothic Revival furniture, and his prominence may, in part, account for the neglect of Philadelphia's furniture. A dispassionate consideration of his designs might make note of the extraordinary extent to which he borrowed from the existing architectural and design literature, which he mastered by reading through thousands of volumes in the library of Ithiel Towne.

Of course, alongside Davis's work is the parallel tradition of Louis-Philippe rosewood furniture made in New York City by prominent Francophile or French cabinetmakers like Charles Baudoine and Alexandre Roux. This furniture, above all, has enjoyed the highest prestige among advanced collectors, partly because of its exquisite workmanship, partly because it is loaded with carved ornament.

The current prestige as designers enjoyed by Pugin and Davis underscores the need to understand that the design imperatives of furniture and architecture differ in fundamental ways. This might seem obvious, were it not for the tendency among American decorative arts curators to assume that furniture designed by architects is better than that designed by cabinetmakers. Further, while the critical literature emphasizes that the three successive styles of Gothic Revival furniture – Rococo Gothic, Regency Gothic, and Reform Gothic – were three discrete episodes, they were not. They functioned as a looped continuum, wherein cabinetmakers, upholsterers, and architects continually referred back to older sources.

Many of the standard motifs of the 1830-1860 era reached their mature formulations during the supposedly frivolous Rococo period, including chairs with rose window backs; octagonal pillar legs; sunken panels articulating straight parts; tracery articulating pierced or curved parts; and crests ornamented with gables, crockets, and finials. Furthermore, eclectic mixes of various styles, whether in the form of decorative ensembles of objects in different styles or of individual objects composed of elements from different styles, also dates back to the eighteenth century.

Eclecticism is not, in other words, evidence for Victorian cultural or esthetic disarray. Nor need one entertain certain critical assertions regarding the superiority of Gothic Revival designs stressing straight components over curved ones, or deplore the interaction of revivals of late Classical, Rococo, Mannerist, Baroque, Gothic, Islamic, Egyptian, Asiatic, and other manners that unfolded between 1790 and 1860. Each of these styles could and did give rise to florid developments, but each made a contribution to the simplified, structural taste that is thought to have contributed to modernism.

How all these long-term developments played out in Philadelphia was never completely determined by economics or lingering stylistic traits of the Federal and Empire periods. As this essay suggests, Philadelphia shared a great many traits with New York, including a large pool of capable immigrant artisans, but the overall lower economic potential of the region, and the inherent conservatism of the leading families, impacted what was popular here.

Crawford Riddell is best known for the famous Rosedown suite of furniture, which is documented in a bill from Riddell’s Journeyman Cabinetmaker’s Furniture Warehouse. Riddell first began working in 1835 and died in 1849. He ran the Journeyman Warehouse from 1837 to 1844, but obviously he did not make all the furniture sold there. In the case of the famous Rosedown suite, he must have commissioned the various parts of the suite from a number of shops.

Certainly the objects display marked variation and can not be regarded as a suite, as such, except that they were purchased together. The suite included a bedstead, an armoire, two washstands, a dressing bureau, a cheval glass, a writing table, and six chairs. The extraordinary degree of carving displayed by this furniture does not mean that it rivaled the best Parisian-style Gothic from New York, but certainly it was the most extravagant Gothic Revival furniture known from Philadelphia.

Another major commission for which Riddell was partially responsible was the furnishing of the immense Greek Revival villa, “Phil-Ellena,” in Germantown, built about 1842 to 1844. Photographs of the interiors taken before the 1890s illustrate a number of important Gothic Revival objects, notably two center tables, a set of bookcases, and a set of side chairs identical to the chairs in the Rosedown suite. The center tables demonstrate that the Parisian taste was not unknown in Philadelphia. As two of the most heavily-decorated Gothic Revival monuments to survive, the Phil-Ellena center tables assume a paramount position in the profile of the city’s furniture history.

Of equally great importance for the history of Philadelphia furniture are the chairs visible in the 1890s photograph of the Phil-Ellena library and several variants related to them. These veneered chair designs are unmistakable evidence for European influence on Philadelphia workmanship. In both Parisian and central European work, all-veneered seating was typical of production at mid-century. The stave-built, veneered crest of the second variant illustrated here is overtly Biedermeier in inspiration, and this suggests that these chairs and the Phil-Ellena center tables were made by French or German artisans employed by Riddell.

A commission dating about 1858 for a group of furniture for the Wurts family Gothic Revival villa in Belvidere, New Jersey, documents the work of a littleknown German cabinetmaker on Pine Street, Adolphus Hoehling (1807-1892). The group of furniture consists of a gaming table, a table-étagère, and a small sideboard or locker (not illustrated). This furniture is attributed to Hoehling on the basis of an inscription on the underside of the marble top of the sideboard, directing that it be delivered to Hoehling’s business address.

The only other object that can be documented as Hoehling’s work is a utilitarian bookcase made by him to hold the many volumes of Philadelphian Sidney George Fisher’s diary, now at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. A double bookcase that appears to be by Hoehling descended in the Ingersoll family of Philadelphia, and several smaller bookcases in the same style recently appeared on the antiques market. Finally, a small work table with sarcophagus top, remarkably similar to the Wurts gaming table, is in a Massachusetts collection.

Hoehling’s designs are appropriate to a rural villa. Most of his furniture is veneered with walnut, and while the objects do have some carving, they are not really appropriate for a townhouse. Also, Hoehling may have enjoyed a following among Philadelphia’s conservative elite, but he ran a small shop on Pine Street, not an elite decorating business like those of Klauder & Deginter, Alphonse Lejambre, or Gottlieb Vollmer. Hoehling’s furniture is, therefore, a great deal more restrained and perhaps a bit provincial in character.

Various other seating forms attributed to Philadelphia illustrate aspects of English, French, and Biedermeier influence. One of the most important is a group of chairs associated with the cabinetmaking firm of Klauder & Deginter. This firm is best known for having provided comprehensive furnishings for Gustavus George Logan’s villa, “Restalrig Hall,” in Germantown in 1854 and 1855, most of which is in a heavy, Germanic Rococo manner. Eventually most of this furniture came to “Loudoun,” a renovated Federal villa in Germantown that now belongs to the City of Philadelphia and is administered by the Fairmount Park Commission.

Surviving bills for the furniture from Klauder & Deginter include “one goth[ic] Chair,” thought to be a side chair still preserved at Loudoun. Numerous sets of these chairs survive, and they represent a curious fusion of Germanic design with elements drawn from the English architectural literature. Other seating forms with more tenuous Philadelphia connections display strong French influence. Among the more spectacular Philadelphia seating types is one of a pair of upholstered high-backed settees with extensive carving and high crests with crockets and floral finials.

Tables and case pieces associated with Philadelphia represent fusions of the heavy, architectural English taste and the fussy Parisian taste, with the odd Beidermeier specimen. The liquor cabinet with pylon door is one of the most common conjunctions of English and Germanic design in Philadelphia. Such liquor cabinets were widely exported to the South.

Although modern collectors usually do not assign cane seating any sort of monetary or artistic value, Philadelphia cane seating in the Gothic style made some original contributions to American design. This was unusual within the greater cohort of American cane seating, most of which was stereotyped. Certain models derived from American fancy chairs and Windsors, as well as European highstyle sources, were manufactured in large numbers, and manufacturers in many urban centers copied chairs from other regions.

The modern negative image suffered by factory chairs, emphasized by the low prestige of cane chairs associated with cheap painted “cottage” bedroom suites, actually was not reflected in period usage. The better cane chairs retained something of the prestige associated with expensive fancy chairs of the Federal period, and cane seating supplemented upholstered furniture in parlors, to say nothing of the French Second Empire phenomenon of gilt ballroom seating with cane or rush seats.

In addition to domestic furniture, other objects used in daily life were designed in the Gothic taste. Gothic motifs are prevalent in the mediums of ceramics, glass, metals, papers, and textiles. Many smaller items were imported from Europe, and, as with furniture, these objects were not direct copies of period artifacts. Those included here are characteristic of what circulates on the antiques market today.

Although this small exhibition only scratches the surface of the Gothic Revival in Philadelphia, it introduces many important objects never exhibited or published before. It is noteworthy that only two objects were borrowed from one institutional collection, while all the rest are from private collections. It is also worth remembering that these new discoveries are largely the result of fieldwork at the lowest levels of the antiques market.

While the major auction houses specializing in nineteenth-century material emphasize the Rococo Revival style, that abundant material perhaps lacks the intellectual intrigue of the various Gothic styles. The fact is, that combinations of styles in many media gave rise to extraordinary creativity at this time. Now, at least, Philadelphians can identify numerous Gothic Revival design strains to cherish as part of the city’s heritage, and much more such furniture and other decorative arts can be sought in the future.

- Robert F. Trent and Harry Mack Truax II

Acknowledgements

Lenders to the Exhibition

• Robert F. Trent and Harry Mack Truax II
• Walter Joseph Stewart
• Stiles T. Colwill III
• Judith Hollander
• Richard Cote and Bruce Young
• Robert Curtis Chinnici and Jeffrey Adams
• Wyck Association, Germantown

Loan Exhibit Committee

• Joan Johnson, Chairman
• Robert F. Trent, Curator
• Harry Mack Truax II, Curator
• Cathy Baldwin
• Barry Barlow
• Albert Orr
• Stephen Ruszkowski

Technical Assistance

• Barry Barlow
• Cathy Baldwin
• John Seiffert
• Murray Douglas

Photography

• Laszlo Bodo

The 2005 Loan Exhibit was generously underwritten by FREEMAN'S, America's Oldest Auction House.