Lockwood de Forest at Bryn Mawr
Lockwood de Forest's interpretation of Indian design is embedded in Bryn Mawr's aesthetic identity. He was actively involved in numerous campus design projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: interior decoration of the Great Hall, architectural plans for the campus center and health center, designs for the Cloister fountain and memorial plaques, the Deanery garden, the Denbigh bench, campus lighting, and even the library bookplate. These designs melded Indian materials and techniques with romantic medievalism of Bryn Mawr's Collegiate Gothic architecture. In the Great hall, references to Oxford colleges and Jacobean manors were executed in teakwood construction; its ceiling was decorated with stencil designs adapted from Gujarati metalwork.
De Forest supervised renovations of the now-demolished Deanery, M. Carey Thomas's private residence on campus. In these interiors, de Forest blended Thomas's belongings with collections brought by Mary Garrett, heir to the Baltimore-Ohio Railroad fortune and college benefactor, when she moved from her Baltimore mansion to reside with Thomas in 1904. The interiors combined objects from multiple sources: furniture produced by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company, chairs purchased in Kashmir, decorative arts from the Middle East, and furniture designed by de Forest and produced in New York.
Even further, de Forest acted as what Thomas called her "counsellor-in-chief" in their negotiations with various contractors and decorating firms, including Tiffany Studios and the Moravian Tile Co. De Forest advised on everything from wall colors to wages, from lawsuits to the carving of cloister gargoyles. The control that Thomas exerted over campus affairs makes it difficult to determine the exact level of de Forest's involvement in these projects. Nevertheless, Thomas came to find him indispensable.
Ruth Levy Merriam (BMC 1931)
A History of the Deanery
Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1965
Bryn Mawr College Archives
Deanery Committee
The Deanery, Floorplan and Room Tariffs
c.1933
Bryn Mawr College Archives
Ida Pritchett (BMC 1914)
Dorothy Vernon Room, Deanery
c.1934
Bryn Mawr College Archives
Typewritten list: “Matters to Consult Mr. de Forest About”
c.1905–8
M. Carey Thomas Office Files, Bryn Mawr College Archives
Lockwood de Forest
Bryn Mawr College Library Bookplate
Designed 1908
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
Lockwood de Forest
Blueprint Design for Denbigh Memorial Bench (facsimile)
1910
M. Carey Thomas Office Files, Bryn Mawr College Archives
G.G. Nassan & Cie. to M. Carey Thomas, March 25, 1920
M. Carey Thomas Personal Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives
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
Plate L: “Damascus Tiles”
from Lockwood de Forest, Illustrations of Design: Based on Notes of Line as Used by the Craftsmen of India.Boston: Ginn and Company, 1912
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
This laundry list of “Matters to Consult Mr. De Forest About” shows the large range of his projects on campus and the minute level at which he advised College administrators and contractors. De Forest had provided decoration for Thomas’s Taylor Hall office when she assumed the College presidency in 1894, and there is evidence that he was responsible for interior decoration for the Deanery in the 1890s. His activity at Bryn Mawr peaked during the first decades of the twentieth century, with the construction and decoration of Old Library between 1905 and 1910 and the extensive renovations to the Deanery in 1908.
Despite the large body of archival evidence of de Forest's work at Bryn Mawr, his level of involvement in these projects is often unclear, and it is difficult to determine when his is acting as an advisor, designer, decorator, artist, import salesman, or friend. The Damascus tiles used in the Deanery garden fountains provide an example of this. De Forest had imported tiles from Syria to use in other projects, notably in his own Manhattan home at 7 East 10th Street. De Forest designed the Deanery fountains and steps in 1908 and may have sent Damascus tile to be used in the fountains in 1910. But, it is also evident from a 1920 letter that Thomas placed her own order to import tiles at great cost from G.G. Nassan & Cie., Damascus.
Joseph Nash and John Corbet Anderson
The Mansions of England in the Olden Time
London: Sotheran, 1874
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
Plate XI: “Prints from Stencils”
from Lockwood de Forest, Illustrations of Design: Based on Notes of Line as Used by the Craftsmen of India. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1912
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
Map showing M. Carey Thomas’s Indian Travel Route, 1923
M. Carey Thomas Personal Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives
M. Carey Thomas
Diary v.160, March 13–14, 1923
M. Carey Thomas Personal Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives
M. Carey Thomas
“New York Bryn Mawr Club Speech, December 14, 1923”
M. Carey Thomas Personal Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives
In the decoration of the Dorothy Vernon Room and the Great Hall, Lockwood de Forest blended his interpretation of Indian art with an equally romanticized English past. His designs for the staircase and paneling of the Great Hall, which significantly undercut the original design by architects Cope & Stewardson, may have drawn on Joseph Nash’s illustrations of Elizabethan castles and country houses. The complicated ceiling designs seen here were rendered in red and blue paint that recalls Ahmedabad mosque traceries, while the patterns on the Great Hall beams draw more directly on the stenciling techniques de Forest developed from The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company metalwork.
M. Carey Thomas was obviously aware of the furniture’s origin and importance when she transferred the contents of the Deanery to the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Association, writing:
But when she travelled to India in 1923, even visiting Ahmedabad, she made no mention of the connection. Her diary entries record a visit to Sidi Saiyyed where she notes not its beauty but the “filth indescribable,” an experience completely at odds with that of Lockwood de Forest.I am extremely anxious that the really beautiful furniture + ornaments + rugs left in place on the 1st floor + in the second story stairhall upstairs library + 2 upstairs guest rooms should never be sold... The Indian furniture was made in India by the old craftsmen who have now gone out of existence. The rugs were bought by an intimate friend of Miss Garrett + mine [de Forest] in Persia + are of a kind no longer made.
The lessons of travel hardened Thomas’s belief in white supremacy. Describing her 1923 world-tour in the draft of a speech to the BMC Club in New York, she described India as “a terrifying example of what we may revert to, if our present civilization perishes.” Such sentiments from a woman who lived her adult life surrounded by Indian-made objects, sitting on chairs made in Kashmir, and sleeping in a bed made in Ahmedabad are impossible to reconcile.