Entering the Gallery
Bryn Mawr College is home to a remarkable collection of furniture made in the late nineteenth century by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in Gujarat, India. But how did Indian art and design come to occupy the central spaces of this American campus? A closer look beyond the intricately carved chairs and densely patterned metalwork reveals complex global networks of art, labor, and patronage, as well as the ambiguous role of Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932), the designer responsible for bringing them here.
The exhibition explores de Forest's furniture and decorating work at Bryn Mawr College as an expression of his "all-over" vision of design. De Forest used "all-over design" to describe non-directional, infinitely repeating patterns, but the phrase also captures the aesthetic density of de Forest's interior decorating projects and the expansive geographic origins of this furniture. De Forest arranged Indian-made chairs, sofas, and tables alongside Syrian chairs, Russian bronzes, and Tiffany glass, to create eclectic spaces in which every surface was laden with pattern and texture.
De Forest celebrated an 'Indian' aesthetic, advocated for Indian furniture makers, and argued for the inclusion of Indian art in American museums and schools. Though genuine, his enthusiasm was framed by Orientalist attitudes which emphasized the exotic and decorative aspects of Indian art and helped to perpetuate longstanding systems of colonial oppression. At Bryn Mawr, his client M. Carey Thomas had an avid interest in global art and design—an interest held in tandem with her damaging belief in racial hierarchy and policies of exclusion. The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company furniture displayed here offers a physical trace of this layered history.
The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company
Side Chair
ca. 1881–1886
Wood, upholstery
Bequest of M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894–1922
Deanery.368
M. Carey Thomas
John Singer Sargent
July 1899
Oil on canvas
Commissioned by Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
X.205
This small but perfectly formed chair was made by carpenters working for The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in Gujarat, India. The vining foliage of the chairback was inspired by jali stone traceries from Ahmedabad’s mosques. Along its stretchers and stiles, graceful scrollwork contrasts with the chair’s strongly rectilinear form.
The technical skill required to execute such delicate carving in dense, oily teakwood is as much a demonstration of artistic virtuosity as John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the chair’s owner, M. Carey Thomas. The choice of Lockwood de Forest to appoint campus spaces with such chairs, at least as much as this choice of the premier portrait artist of the time, would have affirmed Thomas’s social status and artistic taste.
Sargent depicted many of his female sitters amongst floral couches and gleaming silver tea sets. His portrait of Thomas is stripped of almost all signs of a domestic interior, apart from the scrolled arm of the chair which she grips. The emptiness of the portrait conflicts with the aesthetic density of the domestic spaces designed for Thomas by de Forest. Thomas’s home on campus, the Deanery, was crammed with objects and ornaments from all over the world, including this chair.