Dismantling the Interior
By applying a twenty-first-century lens in our interpretation, we can dismantle these interiors and the cultural values inherent in them. Armed with a fuller understanding of the context of this furniture and the global networks that produced, transported, and consumed it, we can add nuance to the complicated story of this material.
Everyday Exoticism
Studies of de Forest tend to focus on his artistic fascination with the ‘exotic’ as an expression of cultural difference. Indeed, his obsessive references to ancient designs and handcrafted forms may have provided an escapist fantasy from industrialized American society, collapsing geographic and temporal distances.
However much this furniture may have inspired romantic longings for far-off lands, its primary function for most purchasers was practical: to provide bodily comfort in a daily way. Repeated use of the furniture made it part of the routines of those who slept and sat on it, as well as those who cleaned and cared for it, encoding the ‘exotic’ in everyday life.
The quotidian lives of things can be lost when furniture is isolated in museum contexts or exhibited solely as art. De Forest regarded objects of daily use as art, arguing that “anything exceptionally well done becomes a Fine Art—spelled with capitals F and A.” His more expansive definition allows for art in the everyday, for furniture that simultaneously embodies the ‘exotic’ and the mundane.
Labor
In his writings, de Forest refers to the highly skilled carvers of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company not with names, but collectively as an anonymous group of “boys and men,” or as mistri, a term denoting both a sub-caste of woodworkers and
the hereditary position of craftsmen. The official report of the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–4 gives a rare description of the Company workshops, noting that in addition to all the best carvers in Ahmedabad, workers were also brought from Kadi, Pattan, and Surat. Unusually, the report names “three mistries, Tribhuvan, a first-class man, Jalu, and Ranchord,” as responsible for drawing out the designs for carvings.
The Company promoted creative freedom among its artisans as a stated goal. Carvers enjoyed increased independence in selecting and executing their designs, but this autonomy was aesthetic not economic. De Forest and Hutheesing did not challenge the wage labor system; rather, they applied foreign patronage to an existing structure.
Labor conditions for objects produced outside the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company workshops are even more obscure. Antiques that de Forest purchased on his travels may have come to market through theft or looting. There also is evidence that de Forest placed orders for carpets produced by jail labor at Jaipur and Benares. Later, Purushottambhai Hutheesing established his own weaving workshop with the support of de Forest, staffed by former inmates from the Bombay Central Jail. The aestheticization of these objects masks the oppressive labor conditions in which they were manufactured.
Appropriation
De Forest embedded work by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company into the densely furnished drawing rooms, libraries, and dining rooms he designed for clients like Mary Garrett and M. Carey Thomas. In these spaces, the tree-of-life traceries of the Sidi Saiyyed mosque and the pierced brass foils used as Ahmedabadi wedding decorations were stripped of their religious and cultural meaning and appropriated as decorative additions to the American domestic setting. The central tenet of the Aesthetic Movement, “art for art’s sake,” obscured historical specificity in favor of culturally- determined aesthetic values. In 1916, de Forest donated architectural elements from the Vadi Parshvanatha Jain temple in Patan, Gujarat to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In his enthusiastic description of the dome, de Forest wrote that he “did not need anything of its history” to recognize the carving’s value as “a real work of art.”
Loss and Dispersal
In 1968, the Deanery was demolished. The sprawling cottage- turned-mansion no longer served the needs of the Alumnae Association, who had assumed ownership after M. Carey Thomas vacated in 1933. The Dorothy Vernon Room was carefully dismantled, and the Deanery’s contents were sold or dispersed to Wyndham and administrative spaces across campus. Canaday Library opened on its site in 1970, and a reduced-scale recreation of the Dorothy Vernon room was installed in Haffner Hall the following year. Today, the remaining furniture is held in storage by Special Collections.
To someone like de Forest, the furniture may have represented traditional forms of craftsmanship that were in danger of being lost. The objects displayed here now stand in for another loss, that of the Deanery. As the traces of this lost space, the furniture offers a material connection to College history and a means of accessing and activating the past.
By demolishing the Deanery, the College arguably began the work of dismantling Thomas’s plan for the campus. Dismantling her vision has become the more explicit aim of recent efforts to acknowledge the harmful effects of her racist views and policies. As we consider what can be done to contend with this awful legacy, whether it be un-naming buildings or organizing exhibitions, it seems worth reconsidering the case study of the Deanery’s demolition. What, if any, effect did demolishing this edifice have on addressing Thomas’s legacy of systemic racial bias? What should be done with the remnants of that home on view in this exhibition? How might deconstructing, not demolishing, these artifacts enable us to tell fuller histories of the College now and in the future?
The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company
Armchair
ca. 1881–1886
Wood
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
Deanery.360
This grand armchair was reupholstered during the 1990 renovation of the Dorothy Vernon Room in Haffner Hall. The chair’s finials are carved into human figures, unusual among this collection, and are equally detailed on the reverse. The care taken to decorate the back of this chair and the caster wheels attached to its feet indicate that it was made to move and to be seen from all sides. The mobility of the chair is somewhat at odds with its heavy, throne-like form.
The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company
Pierced Decorative Metalwork
ca. 1908
Brass
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
2012.4.6.o, 2012.4.6.q, 2012.4.6.d, 2012.4.6.f, 2012.4.6.u, 2012.4.6.t,
2012.4.6.e
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.
Unknown maker (India)
Peacock feather fan
n.d.
Peacock feather, straw, newsprint
Bryn Mawr College Archives
Unknown maker
Japanese Garden Seat
n.d.
Ceramic
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
Deanery.184
The Deanery was decorated inside and out with objects selected by de Forest and its garden was furnished in a similar Orientalist mode as the interiors. This ceramic garden seat was one of 14 similar seats that de Forest sold to Thomas in 1910. Its Japanese origins demonstrate that, although India held a particular fascination for de Forest, his all-over approach to design incorporated imported goods from around the globe. Japanese decorative arts became increasingly accessible in the late nineteenth century with the rise of import business like Yamanaka & Co. and A.A. Vantine’s.
Unknown maker (Damascus, Syria)
Cypress Tile from the Deanery Garden
n.d.
Ceramic
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
W.566 and W.567
Unknown maker
Jardiniere
n.d.
Ceramic
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
W.545
The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company
Bed
ca. 1885–1887
Chased brass over teak core, perforated copper
Gift of Mary Patterson McPherson, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1978–1997
Deanery.453
Peacocks were an evocative symbol of the Aesthetic Movement, favored for their beautiful plumage and their associations with Japanese and Islamic art. Here, the fanned tail of a peacock forms the central panel of a headboard owned by Mary Garrett. The beds were manufactured using a repoussé technique, where metal is pushed out from inside to form a textured, three-dimensional surface. A similar effect is used in a low chair designed by de Forest, now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This bed and its twin are visible in archival photographs of Mary Garrett’s bedroom, while a similar full-size bed is seen in the bedroom of M. Carey Thomas. After the demolition of the Deanery, the beds were used in guest bedrooms at Pen y Groes until 1998, when they were sold or transferred to Special Collections.
Unknown maker (Kashmir, India)
Side Chair
1881
Wood, paint, upholstery
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
Deanery.372
This chair was not manufactured at Ahmedabad but is believed to have been commissioned by de Forest during his travels in northern India in 1881. The turned legs and gilt floral decoration resemble papier-mâché charpoy beds common to Kashmir. At least 12 chairs were produced, some of which are on view at Olana State Historic Site, the home of de Forest’s mentor Frederic Church. This chair has sustained significant damage to its painted surfaces and the twentieth-century upholstery is ripped and stained. Its poor condition is a reminder that the chair was a working piece of furniture for most of its 136-year life.