Notes of Line
Born in New York in 1850, Lockwood de Forest belonged to a wealthy family of lawyers, financiers, and philanthropists, who were deeply interested in the arts. His sister Julia was a published art historian while his brother Robert served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lockwood pursued a career as an artist and interior decorator. His aesthetic development was informed by studies in landscape painting with the Hudson River School artist Frederic Church and by extensive travels, first in Europe and the Middle East, and later in India.
It was only in India, de Forest wrote, that handicrafts had been "brought to the highest perfection." Like contemporaries in the Arts and Crafts Movement, de Forest was concerned by the detrimental effects of industrialization on the well-being of artisans and the quality of their art. The growing divide between handicraft and the so-called fine arts could be bridged, he argued, by the manufacturing techniques and "language of design" that been perfected by Indian artisans.
De Forest's publications carefully reproduced examples of Indian woodcarving and architecture to instruct American art students about their value. His writings present a highly romanticized, and thus Orientalist, view of Indian handicrafts, emphasizing the makers' innate mastery of form and their natural, almost mystical affinity for "notes of line."
Indian Domestic Architecture
Boston: Heliotype Printing Co., 1885
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
Lockwood de Forest
Illustrations of Design: Based on Notes of Line as Used by the Craftsmen of India
Boston: Ginn and Company, 1912
Bryn Mawr College Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection
De Forest produced three publications on Indian architecture and design. These volumes served a dual purpose, aiming to educate American art students as well as potential clients. His first book, Indian Domestic Architecture, is a combination of photographic plates of Ahmedabad homes, interior scenes from de Forest’s home, and details of carvings produced by The Ahmedabad Wood Working Company. Its short captions and lack of descriptive text frustrated American reviewers but the volume reflects de Forest’s tendency to favor action over words.
Illustrations of Design was more clear-cut in its didactic purpose. Its ring binder format allowed students to remove the loose illustrations for exercises. In his introductory essay, de Forest proposes a structured language of design, perhaps related to Owen Jones’ Grammar. Using three “notes,” the triangle, right-angle, and curve, students could begin to compose designs in the manner of music. De Forest honed an interest in teaching early in his career through his involvement in the Society of Decorative Art, founded in New York in 1877 to instruct women workers in handicrafts. This interest seems to have gained momentum later in life and it is tempting to consider how his time at Bryn Mawr may have influenced de Forest’s later thoughts on education.
Owen Jones
The Grammar of Ornament
London: Day and Son, 1856
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
George C. M. Birdwood
The Industrial Arts of India
London: Chapman and Hall, 1884
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
European and American interest in Indian art was shaped by a group of designers, educators, and colonial officials associated with the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A Museum, London, who viewed the diverse arts of the Indian subcontinent through an exhibitionary lens.
Owen Jones designed the interiors of the 1851 Great Exhibition, where “the gorgeous contributions of India” had outshone the decorative arts of other nations. His Grammar of Ornament extracted decoration from objects exhibited at 1851 and 1855, flattening art into a two-dimensional world-tour structured by chronology and religion. George Birdwood was part of a second generation of South Kensington officials who continued to promote Indian art through international exhibitions, scholarly publications, and the establishment of art schools in India.
Both authors idealized Indian handicraft as ‘truer’ and more natural than modern industrial production. This truth, they believed, arose from the village craftsmen’s hereditary instinct for color and pattern. De Forest was frequently critical of both Birdwood and bureaucratic intervention in the arts more generally, but his similarly preservationist attitudes are evident in his writings and his work with the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company.
Theodore Cracraft Hope, James Fergusson
Architecture at Ahmedabad the Capital of Goozerat
London: J. Murray, 1866
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
James Fergusson
History of Indian and Eastern Architecture
London: J. Murray, 1876
Carpenter Library, Bryn Mawr College
De Forest planned his travels in India using architectural histories written by British colonialists in the mid-nineteenth century. These histories provided a list of sites to visit and illustrated living architecture as aesthetic ruins that seemed overgrown, decaying, and almost always devoid of human life—barring the occasional picturesque figure added for scale.
Financed by Bombay stockbroker Premchund Roychund, Architecture at Ahmedabad was illustrated with photographs of Ahmedabad’s architectural sites taken by Colonel Thomas Biggs, the government photographer for the Bombay Presidency. Both texts on view here include the Hutheesing Jain Temple in Ahmedabad, which would have been recently completed in 1848. Its inclusion speaks to the prominence of this building and the Hutheesing family as patrons, but Hope’s praise of the building and its makers is still couched in paternalism:
its dimensions are of the first order, its style the pure Jaina; and it stands a convincing proof that the native architecture has not been extinguished by centuries of repression, and that in its builder, Prumchund Sulat, and his co-adjutors, exists a class of practical architects capable, under due encouragement, of taking up and turning to profit the glorious legacy which their ancestors have bequeathed to them.