 Welcome, I'm Ellen Lofton, can you hear me? I'm a senior curator of contemporary design here at Cooper Hewitt and it's my delight to welcome you to tonight's celebration. We have been open now for six weeks after closing for three years for our renovation. And tonight's event focuses on our newly restored Jewel in the Crown, the former Andrew Carnegie Family Library, informally known here by our family as the Teak Room. No part of the museum's renovation received more tender loving care than Lockwood de Forest's amazing Teak Room and you can see here conservators cleaning and preserving that room. We could not be more thrilled with the outcome and what better way to highlight this special asset, the only extant Lockwood de Forest interior in the original setting for which it was designed than to organize an exhibition that pays homage to its designer, to his influence and to his mentor the Hudson River School painter Frederick Church. These covered in tonight's program include de Forest clients and earlier commissions, his relationship with Frederick Church, his intrigue with India and sources for the Teak Room Commission. Cooper Hewitt is indebted to the American Express Foundation and the American Express Historic Preservation Fund for their tremendous generosity in providing support for the restoration of the Teak Room and for our exhibition. We're very grateful to the Olana partnership for their collaboration in tonight's event and for their generous loans to the exhibition and we urge you to go to Olana and see the beautiful work there. We would also like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Frank Goss of Sullivan Goss and American Gallery for their support of this evening's reception, viewing and object donations. Regrettably they cannot be with us tonight but they are represented by Jeremy Tesmer, Gallery Director. And of course thanks to our other lenders, Posey Bass and Henry Taves, the Metropolitan Cleveland and Indianapolis Museums of Art, the Field Museum, Molly and Joe Seiler, David Scott Parker, Bryn Mawr College and Smithsonian Libraries. I do think that your loans look better here than ever, anywhere, of course. So tonight we're going to have three presentations followed by a Q&A with the audience and I'm going to briefly introduce our outstanding scholars who will be presenting and then they'll come up one by one and speak to you. Our first speaker will be Gail S. Davidson, Curator of Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt and she is the co-curator with Sarah Coffin of our exhibition called Passion for the Exotic Lockwood de Forest Frederick Church. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1980 and as a graduate student, Gail co-curated the first exhibition ever on American Luminism at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. By Cooper Hewitt, she has curated six exhibitions including the critically acclaimed Frederick Church, Williams Homer, I mean, Winslow Homer and Thomas Moran, Tourism in the American Landscape, an exhibition based on Cooper Hewitt's collection of over 2,000 drawings and oil sketches by Frederick Church and over 200 drawings by Wilmslow Homer, a collection that Gail oversees outstanding. Tonight her talk will be on Lockwood de Forest, Painter as Diarist. Our second presentation will be by Roberta A. Mayer, Professor of Art History at Bucks County Community College in Newton, Pennsylvania, Newtown, Pennsylvania. She is author of Lockwood de Forest, Furnishing the Gilded Age with a Passion for India and Stella Elkins Tyler, A Legacy Born of Bronze. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals including Winterthur Portfolio, Studies in the Decorative Arts and Archives of American Art Journal. She has also received many awards including the prestigious Robert C. Smith Award for the Decorative Arts Society in 2001. Recently she was guest curator for All the Raj, Frederick Church in Lockwood de Forest, creating, decorating and collecting at Olana and exhibition held at the Evelyn and Maurice Sharp Gallery at Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York. And our last speaker will be Sarah Coffin. Since joining Cooper Hewitt as head of the Product Design and Decorative Arts Department here at Cooper Hewitt 11 years ago, Sarah Coffin has curated and co-curated five exhibitions with publications, the last of which was Set and Style, The Jewelry of Van Cleef and Arpels. For the museum's reopening, she was the project manager for the Permanent Collections Galleries exhibition on the second floor and was co-curator of Lockwood de Forest, Frederick Church. Sarah's research in late 19th century aestheticism began with her Yale thesis on the furniture and interiors of architect Henry Hobson Richardson. To India, partially funded by a Smithsonian Research Grant three years ago, expanded her research to better understand the context of de Forest Design's commission. So I welcome you to be enlightened by this amazing suite of presentations. Good night. Thank you, Ellen. Before I begin, and because I don't give individual credits on the images, I would like to thank Olana State Historical Site, the Hexra Museum, Huntington, New York, Posey Bass and Henry Taves, de Forest's east coast descendants and major de Forest champions, David Scott Parker of Associated Artists, Sullivan Goss in American Gallery, Gerald Peters Debra Force, Gerald Wonderlock and Company, and finally Mark Murray for the images they provided. And a special thanks to Amanda Kesner, who up till the last minute was fiddling with my PowerPoint because three people were working on it at once. And so you will see the results, hopefully acceptable. While recent scholarship has initiated by Roberta Mayer's research on Lockwood de Forest and Book has focused on Lockwood de Forest's career as an interior designer. Oh, I forgot to say, I am going to try to hurry through because there literally is a lot of ground to cover. There has been relatively little written on, especially in the east coast, to present de Forest's present earth. Perhaps this talk will start a trend. De Forest, to you see here in two images reflecting two aspects of his creative activities, the painter and the passionate lover, love of the exotic. It was a very personal experience. It was his way of expressing his emotions through color and light. Though he created some large exhibition pictures, basically he painted small oil sketches for his own pleasure and to document his life experiences. From the start of his career under Frederick Church, he signed his sketches as did church with his initials date and frequently the location. His paintings then become a visual diary of his life, supplemented by letters which he wrote mostly to family and his close colleague and friend, Walter Lant Palmer. I'm going to give you just a tiny bit of biographical background for those who are new to de Forest. De Forest was born into a well-to-do and socially connected New York family. His father, Henry Grant de Forest and his two brothers, Robert and Henry Wheeler de Forest, were Yale graduates and lawyers in the family firm of Weeks and de Forest. Lockwood also had a sister as well as an orphaned cousin, Harriet Carnes, living with them. Hattie, as she was called, was the niece of Frederick Church's wife, making Lockwood the great nephew of Church by marriage. Both Church and the de Forest families socialized and traveled together. They traveled independently to Europe in 1868-69 and met in Rome in December 1868. Church, who had just returned from a trip to Egypt in the Middle East, showed Lockwood around the antique shops in Rome and also had Lockwood and his family visit his studio there. Clearly, de Forest was an artist's worldliness and painting skills. When Church invited him to experience a painter's average work day, by tagging along on a trip to Athens, the young 18-year-old de Forest jumped at the opportunity. Church had been planning to sketch after the Parthenon and surrounding remains in preparation for a major painting of the Greek temple, which some of you know is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had de Forest set up his easel right next to his own. They couldn't have been using traveling paint boxes as well. De Forest observed his mentor selecting the best angle to show of the building, judging how close to get, studying the light at different times of day. Some of you saw this pairing upstairs. Here we see the young de Forest working on the placement of the drum fabric fragments in relationship to each other. He's not yet learned de Forest on the left church on the right. He's not yet learned how to convey depth, light, color or texture, which he would develop soon. Yet he had a natural talent. And this is a pretty good start for someone with no real training, except for some brief lessons in Rome with a Swiss German painter named Herman Corodi. When the de Forest family returned to New York, Locke would ask his parents' permission to forego college at Yale to become a painter. He studied for a short while with James Hart, a respected second generation Hudson River School landscape painter. But anxious to get his career going, he decided to ask his great-uncle Frederick Church if he would take him on as a student, which Church rarely did. This choice gave Locke with the benefit of Church's professional ability as well as his professional connections. Sorry. De Forest arrived at Church's studio outside Hudson, New York in January 1871. Church had him begin by copying his Middle Eastern 1868 oil sketches. But de Forest also must have studied Church's entire collection of oil sketches, including those of Niagara, which he had painted some years before. And here you see Church's oil sketch of the Niagara rapids in his head. Locke would diligently attempted to convey the vigorously churning white water rapids against the dark green forest, which found so easy to replicate. Well, you can see some of Church's brushwork on the right, where he literally sort of his brush scribbles over the surface of the water to give the effect of movement. Capture, sorry, lost my place. A revealing measure of de Forest's progress is the comparison of their late winter 1871 or 1872 paintings of the winter sunset looking southwest from Olana with the snow-covered slopes of the hill in the foreground, the Hudson Valley in the left distance, and the distant Catskill mountains in the center and to the right. The setting sun over the Catskills reflects on the undersides of the high layers of clouds and use of orange and white. In this exercise, de Forest is developing skills. And by the way, I'm trying to show you the scale of de Forest's sketch in comparison to Church's larger sketch. In this exercise, de Forest is developing his color skills and his brush handling, which became lighter and more nuanced. Capturing sunsets, one of Frederick Church's greatest achievements, stayed with de Forest for the rest of his life. By 1872, de Forest was confident enough with his painting skills that he decided to use his family connections and his artistic friendships to rent a studio in the 10th Street Studio Building, where he was in the company of Sanford Gifford, Frederick Church, Jervis McEntee, who were also tenants. Also in 1872, de Forest produced his first large-scale exhibition paintings, which were shown at the National Gallery. National Academy, sorry. While he exhibited at the Academy and elsewhere, de Forest never studied formally, never studied painting at the Academy or elsewhere. He devised his own personal trajectory of study based on intermittent lessons with Church and painting at all the places that Church and other Hudson River Valley landscape painters painted. For example, he sketched in the Adirondacks as well as Maine. And these two sketches of the Adirondacks Lakeshores show him trying to balance foreground detail with background looser brushwork. The mid-1870s marked a second stage in de Forest's development as a painter when he found an entirely new exotic landscape and culture that would determine the future of his professional life. The 25-year-old de Forest traveled with his family on an extended tour of Egypt and the Middle East. His goal was to see as many of the places that Church had seen almost 10 years earlier, Egypt, Palestine, and what is now Syria and Lebanon. For some reason that I don't know, he never went to Petra. Maybe some of you have that answer. Stopping in London and Paris as well as Italy, the de Forest arrived in Cairo in mid-December 1875. Egypt was a dream come true. The scenery entranced him. Everything you see is a perfect picture. You can't even look out of your window without seeing four or five things that you want to make studies of. The rug merchants, which you see on the screen, are the rug merchant bazaar, dating from Cairo, according to Roberta Mayer, is an example of the sites that enchanted him. Cairo, the de Forest took a trip up the Nile, which Church never did, in a rented double-masted houseboat called a Faluka, which you see in a later painting on the left, which I chose so that you could better see although that's a little bit of an exaggeration, the ship in detail. By the way, I was pleased to know, as a sailor, that the de Forest family sailed actively from Long Island and up the coast. So de Forest, who talks about this Crip, knows what he is talking about when he said that it was fun sailing up the Nile because he was sailing against the current, but very boring, floating down the other way. You see the narrow Nile River Valley, which was available for him to see on a raised deck of the Faluka, provided the subject matter of many of his paintings or studies down the Nile. Their boat, by the way, was a deluxe model, 90 feet long, with a crew of 17 men for their party of five or six. It had, as I said, this raised deck, which gave him a view of the flat plain and the hills beyond. He liked the landscape, he said, better than anything he'd ever seen. In one month's time, he made some 61 oil sketches. And the one on the left, the oil sketch on the left, and I don't know its present location, was preparatory for the painting from Gerald Wunderlach, now on view at Deborah Forces Gallery on the right. And it's very interesting to compare the changes that he made from the oil sketch to the larger painting. So he made some 60 sketches before they arrived at the next big stop, the famous temples, complexes of Luxor and Karnak, which you see in two paintings here. The one on the left is a small oil sketch. And by the way, his oil sketches were about nine by 14. Or sometimes he cut them in half. So they were half the size. The Ramiseum at Thebes is a large exhibition painting, which we'll hear about in DeForest's own words. He wrote about Karnak. I think I could find work in the great temple for weeks, even months. Perhaps viewing the temple recalled his earliest painting experiences at the Parthenon with Church, who was inspired by the structure, which he termed the greatest human achievement. DeForest was equipped to draw after the architecture because his friend Palmer suggested that he pick up a camera obscura, which he did in Paris at the shop of Charles Chevalier. And this is an example of one of these camera obscuras on the left and also a smaller version, which could open. And he used that, it was very portable, and he used that to sketch from the boat or from our on land. And here you see a diagram of a young man tracing over the image that the camera obscura takes in through the lens. He wrote, I found my camera a great use in all of the architectural sketching as I could draw the most difficult perspective drawings in a few minutes, which would have taken days otherwise. From his sketch, this way we'll go back, from his sketches of both temple complexes, he executed a major exhibition painting on the right, 37 by 30 inches of the Ramiseum at Carnac, presently on view at the DeForest Gallery. He wrote on February 16th, 1876. As for the Great Hall, I should have liked to have made sketches from every part of it, but had to content myself with eight, one of which will certainly make a great large picture. Perhaps this painting of the Ramiseum was the one that resulted. The next stop of the DeForest family tour was Palestine, where they spent a week in Jerusalem. Surprisingly, DeForest did not find anything that interested him in Jerusalem, except for the mosque of Omar, which he said with some frustration he could not draw. The only view where he could find color was looking off to the Dead Sea. I must have been talking about the view from the Mount of Olives, which you see on the left, which he painted thinking of church's large painting of the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives, for which I show you a preparatory sketch in the Cooper Eewitt Collection. It's the same view, only DeForest is higher up on the hill. At least that's what I conjecture. While the DeForests were in Jerusalem, they took a trip to the Jerusalem, and this particular oil sketch has entered the Cooper Eewitt Collection through the generosity of Solomon Goss Gallery. He wrote about the visit to the Jordan in a letter dated March 20th, 1876. Today we went to the Jordan, where we bathed again. The river itself is a small brook, very muddy. We got back, presumably, to the Jordan River, presumably to their camp at two, and I took my box and walked about two miles to make a sketch, which, I would say, came out rather well. And this really is a great sketch, when I was given my choice of DeForest to take in as a gift, I was drawn to this one because it looks very much like church, but the brushstroke is very particular to DeForest, much looser. Next, the DeForest traveled to Damascus, and from there to Palmyra. He writes about painting like this. As far as I can make out, the entire city was one vast succession of temples, and everywhere there are columns. We counted 350 in perfect condition. They are all Corinthian and mostly in groups from two to 20. They are all marble with a rich reddish brown, with rich reddish brown toward the tops and on the southwest side. If you can imagine columns running off in perspective in all sorts of directions, you have some dim idea of Palmyra. Overlapping the years 1877 to 1879, DeForest was busy with his decorating activities, but he was also exhibiting at the same time at the National Academy of Design and the Century Club, among other venues. DeForest's marriage to a Dupont heiress and their honeymoon trip to India marked a decisive phase in Lockwood's professional interior design career. He was in India buying objects for his decorating partnership with Lewis Comfort Tiffany, but DeForest continued nonstop to paint whenever he had an occasion and whenever the sites stirred his emotions. I show you, while he was in, after he, they were in Bombay, they went north to Amadabad and stopped in Amadabad, which was then a banking center and textile center. As we will hear later, Lockwood met Munganbhai Hussing, a Jane Merchant banker with whom he established a workshop for carving teakwood, cutting brass, and copper for interior decoration projects. While in Amadabad, DeForest made some sketches. These are typical, but on the left is a rather important sketch because it's a view of the buildings around the workshop that DeForest created. The image on the right, the sketch on the right, we think is Amadabad, perhaps the city or the town. From Amadabad, DeForest traveled north and both DeForest traveled north to Jaipur, Agra, Delhi, and Lahore. Southwest of Agra, they stopped at a 16th century fortified city of Fatipur Sikri, city of victory. Today, a World Heritage Site, where DeForest was especially impressed by the red sandstone architecture. And I show you this image on the left, another gift from Sullivan-Goss Gallery. Interesting story about that because when I was looking at all the images with Frank Goss, he said, I have one last one to show you, and I said, that's the one. He said, I spent several days at Fatipur Sikri looking at the buildings, and we wish we could have had Birbal's Palace in India, if only I had written ahead, but I didn't get a chance to look in and sketch some of the interior. But I made a sketch of the exterior, which shone brightly in the sun. This is, as you said, a perfect example of the architecture of Akbar. Another sketch documents DeForest 150 mile trek through Kashmir and Nepal. In Kashmir, they started staying at rest houses, but because of the fleas, they decided to pitch a tent in between. And this relatively large oil sketch shows the tent in the middle with the log cabin, so to speak, on either side, nestled beneath the mountains. By the early 1900s, DeForest votes himself increasingly to painting. This is after his work on the Carnegie Family Library, the teak room, of which we're so proud. His oil sketch of Cuenavaca, Mexico, at Sunset from 1906, recaptures the dramatic Sunset pictures of his mentor, Frederick Church, like the image of Hudson, New York, which DeForest could have seen lots of Sunset paintings, but this one made a good comparison, even though the painting needs conservation. If any of you want to contribute something, it would be much appreciated. At this time, his paintings were held in cities like St. Louis and Indianapolis. I'm getting to the end here. These are my slides of Lockwood DeForest's house in Santa Barbara, which we snuck around because people live in it now, and although they weren't there or they were hiding, they wouldn't open the house for us to see. In 1915, DeForest moves out permanently to Santa Barbara, where he builds this house on Laguna Street. This move marks the latest phase of his painting, Irv, which was based in the Santa Barbara area, although he traveled elsewhere, and DeForest died in Santa Barbara in 1932. Finally, I show you one of the Santa Barbara paintings, which I discovered only recently at a local gallery, and I think this is truly lovely. It's called Sun Burst and dates from 1903, showing the sun setting behind a scruffy foreground. To conclude, I would say that Lockwood DeForest made many conflicting statements about his painting goals. At one point, he said that he wanted to produce an unmediated experience of nature in the raw so that people would not think of him but think directly of nature. But here, I think he's repeating the jargon of the early Hudson River School painters. He more frequently mentions in his letters how the landscape with its colors and light moved him emotionally. I think this is the legacy of what DeForest left to us today. Thank you. Hello everyone. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Sarah Coffin and Gail Davidson for this kind invitation. I really truly am delighted to be here. So we are here to celebrate the Rio Smithsonian National Design Museum and the restoration of Andrew Carnegie's Family Library. The Family Library, now known as the Teak Room, was created by Lockwood DeForest between 1899 and 1902 as part of Andrew Carnegie's new Fifth Avenue mansion. The room was photographed in 1938. In addition to DeForest's teakwood furnishings and architectural design elements, the room also contains fixtures from Tiffany Studios. In her talk, Sarah will provide more detail on the teak room and its restoration. And I would like to put it into a larger context of DeForest's business and some of his other notable patrons. DeForest formed his first business in 1880 with Louis Comfort Tiffany. As you can see from the RG Dunn & Company credit report excerpt at the top, the firm was known as Tiffany and DeForest Decorators. At the time, both met in planting and exhibiting their work for about a decade and both were shifting their attention to artistic decorating. As part of his partnership with Tiffany, DeForest made his first trip to India in 1881, 82 and with some luck, he was able to establish a workshop in Ahmedabad with Muggenbhai Hadis Singh as the manager. Through Hadis Singh, DeForest was able to hire the hereditary Hindu craftsmen or mystery to produce hand-carved teakwood, everything from simple boards, squares, and brackets to extremely complex interior and exterior architectural elements. In 1881, as the workshop was being developed, DeForest sent hundreds of carved teakwood squares in many different patterns to Tiffany in New York. Tiffany, in turn, used these in many of his early decorating projects. And here in the drawing room of former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, we see Tiffany using these teakwood squares in the design of an over mantle. There's lots more illustrated in artistic houses. The firm of Tiffany and DeForest ended shortly after DeForest returned from India, in part because the two partners began to develop their independent interests. Their formal partnership lasted only two years. In May of 1883, DeForest began his own business at 9 East 17th Street under his own name. These are two well-known views of DeForest showrooms which he published in his 1885 book, Indian Domestic Architecture. These views capture the full range of DeForest teakwood squares and moldings, brackets, pierced carved cussed arches and elaborate chimney pieces. We also see the western style parlor furniture that DeForest designed and had crafted in Aminabad. In addition, DeForest offered pink sandstone from Agra and I actually had my brother-in-law bring me a pointer because it's so hard to see this in black and white if I can get this to, oh, I'm highlighting me, okay. All right, there we go. So there's our sandstone here and here. So there's your pink. All right, and Moshrabi is from Cairo which were open-worked wooden panels of interlocking balls and pegs and I'm gonna point those out too. Okay, there you go. Okay, the hand-painted tiles surrounding the hearth came from Damascus. DeForest had started collecting those in his earlier travels before any business ideas emerged. These two views are less well-known and they show the textiles and carpets that DeForest had acquired in Cairo and India. We also see an example of a hanging seat from Aminabad and one of the splendid carved traceries copied from the mosque of Sidi Sayid along with a variety of metalwork. And finally, this view captures DeForest's carved teakwood ceiling panels as well as an interesting chair that was crafted in teakwood and covered with chased brass ornamented with floral designs. DeForest had seen a similar design in Jadpur sketches. This chair was made by the mystery based on his drawings and as an aside, two of these chairs were purchased from DeForest by William Randolph Hearst in 1922 and were recently acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. With his showrooms in place, DeForest began to offer his Indian decor first to friends and family and soon to gilded-aged patrons across the country. As I just noted, the form of Tiffany and DeForest was dissolved after only two years. Nonetheless, Louis Comfort Tiffany continued to be one of DeForest's important patrons beginning with the new Tiffany family mansion on 72nd Street in New York. Planning began in 1882 and DeForest provided many interior architectural elements in carved teakwood. Here you see a mantle and a door that was installed in the upper hall. The mantle 14 feet wide with massive brackets was particularly striking. These spectacular doors which were installed in Tiffany's studio were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the 2006 Laurelton Hall exhibition and are now in the collection of the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida. These were clearly based on a design that DeForest found in Multan today, Pakistan, which he published in Indian Domestic Architecture. In addition, large portions of a house that DeForest had salvaged in Ahmedabad were incorporated into Tiffany's studio as were many of the old Damascus tiles and chests that DeForest had collected. In this room, Tiffany also hung Indian brass chains from the ceiling using these to suspend moss clamps and later after 1893, his own blown glass globes. Although Tiffany and DeForest operated independently after 1882, they continued to have professional connections throughout their careers. Tiffany was always interested in DeForest's aesthetic sensibility. As discussed by Gail, the Hudson River School painter Frederick Church was a DeForest relative and an early important mentor with respect to painting and architectural design. Church was also among DeForest's earliest patrons. Beginning in 1883 and continuing through 1891, Church purchased a variety of DeForest's East Indian architectural woodwork and furniture for the main house at Olana in Hudson, New York. On the upper right, we see a small desk that was custom built from DeForest Teakwood for Isabelle Church. And on the lower right is an 1884 view of the courthole of the main house of Olana. And there we see one of several Kashmiri chairs that DeForest commissioned while subbering in Kashmir in 1881. Let's see if I can get the pointer the right way. That's the, which actually you can see upstairs. Okay. DeForest designed the general form, taking his inspiration from an Indian Sharpoi or Bedstead. He then hired local artisans to embellish the surface with intricate floral patterns that were painted over gold leaf and then lacquered. At least a dozen of these chairs were made on his behalf. On the right, we see the chimney piece in the east parlor of the main house at Olana, along with one of DeForest's Kashmiri chairs in the foreground. The lower left is a view of the elaborate chimney piece in the dining room, which Church had executed in India based on Church's conceptual design, shown here at the upper left. When the studio wing was added to the main house at Olana between 1889 and 1891, DeForest was again involved. He provided architectural design advice, along with a substantial carved teakwood balustrade in the entrance hall to the studio wing. He also designed a chimney piece for the new studio, as well as some additional furniture. Church's house today is in wonderfully intact house museum. Lockwood DeForest's older brother was Robert Weeks DeForest, a prominent New York lawyer and also second president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robert and his wife, Emily, who was John Taylor Johnston's daughter, had an 1832 Greek revival townhouse located at Seven Washington Square. Interior photos of about 1900 to 1910 reveal a house richly appointed with their personal art collection, together with the furnishings from Lockwood. A carved teakwood hanging seat appears in the library, shown at the upper left. The seat was draped with a tiger skin, so the details are not visible, but the heavy brass chains are similar to those that Tiffany used in his studio. On the bottom, you can see that Tiffany, I'm sorry, you can see that Lockwood also furnished, a lion-headed armchair, a writing table, and a large cabinet. And on the upper right, notice the painted cashmere chairs in the parlor. Although the house at Washington Square still stands, the contents were sold at auction in 1936. Mary Garrett. Mary Garrett was perhaps DeForest's most enthusiastic patron. She was a friend of Julia Brasher DeForest, who was Lockwood's son, and Louise Wakeman Knox, who became Tiffany's second wife in 1886. She was also the fourth child and only daughter of Rachel Harrison and John Work Garrett. John Work Garrett was president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad until his death in 1884. That year, Mary Garrett received her inheritance, an amount estimated at $9 million. As early as 1885, DeForest began to work on Garrett's home at 101 West Monument Street in Baltimore. It's good. The first large remodeling project for her came in 1887, while Garrett was away from Baltimore and traveling through. He designed a stenciled paint scheme for her large hall, which was later published in the June 1925th edition of Art and Archaeology, and I thank Hiram Woodward for sharing this reference with me. A letter from DeForest to Garrett indicates that the hall had an upper floor and a dome that held a gas-lit chandelier. DeForest had the dome gilded and patterned with dark and light blue paint, like that in the old mosaics. For the sitting room, DeForest selected a shade of blue for the ceiling and designed a blue frieze, which seems to have been overlaid with perforated copper. Below the frieze, DeForest had the walls painted with orange, light yellow, and blue. Some of the walls were embellished with perforated teakwood panels, while the teakwood arches were used in windows and in doorways. This house was destroyed in 1940, but much of the interior architecture was donated to the bottom of art. When Mary Garrett moved from Baltimore to Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 1904, she brought much of her furniture with her, including a carved teakwood parlor suite in DeForest's signature style. These are several of the pieces from that suite and the large hexagonal table still has a shipping label, though badly oxidized includes Mary Garrett's name. These were probably from the Baltimore sitting room. And it is quite likely that this hanging seat together with a pair of chased brass bedsteads with pierced carved panels were also from the Baltimore house. Obviously, one of the headboards is now on view here at the Cooper Hewitt, and again, they're beautiful. Garrett's dazzling interiors are long gone and pieces from her collection are scattered, but it is easy to see that she was an important patron and that DeForest gave her his most sumptuous designs. And thanks to Mary Garrett and M. Kerry Thomas, DeForest also did a lot of later work at Bryn Mawr College, everything from stenciled walls to lamppost to the design of the gymnasium with his son-in-law. This large topic is beyond the scope of my talk today, but it is worth noting. Although his friends and family helped get his business started, DeForest soon attracted the attention of other prominent patrons. Among them, Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer. Potter Palmer was a successful Chicago businessman and real estate investor, and by the early 1880s, the Palmers were able to build a lavish family home, a crenellated stone castle on Lake Shore Drive. Begot in 1882 and completed in 1884, DeForest was one of several decorators who had a hand in the interior design. He provided a reception room and a large adjoining drawing room, both richly appointed with carved teakwood. DeForest accounts list of frieze for P. Palmer on November 30th, 1883, and as seen here, a record of Mrs. Palmer's mantle on March 25th, 1885. In 1925, the towering chimney piece shown here was salvaged from the Palmer Castle. Standing over 12 feet high, the clustered spires of the over mantle recall those atop the outer walls of the Hadesing Jain Temple in Amnibod, and in all likelihood, it is the mantle identified in DeForest's account book. The whereabout of this piece is presently not known and the Palmer Castle was destroyed in 1950. Billy and Franklin McVeigh also took an interest in DeForest's offerings. McVeigh, a Chicago attorney who would serve as US Secretary of the Treasury from 1909 to 1913, was the owner of Franklin McVeigh and Company, wholesale grocers. The McVeigh house was designed by Henry Hopson Richardson and according to DeForest, Richardson was one of the few professional architects who took an interest in his Indian woodwork. The construction of their house began in 1886, the year of Richardson's death and it was completed in 1887. DeForest's teakwood tracery from the mosque of C.D. Syed was used as a screen between the parlor and the staircase in the main hall, as shown here on the right. The McVeigh house was destroyed in 1922 but the C.D. Syed tracery survived the wrecking ball and was given as a gift to Boyd College in Wisconsin. A fortune from the Comstock Silver Load enabled James Clare Flood to build his knob hill mansion in San Francisco. So I'll take you across the country. In 1886, DeForest received a commission for a reception room. An interior photograph shows at least some of DeForest's contribution. In the foreground on the left is the distinctive lion's head that embellished many of DeForest's armchairs. Sometimes you don't see that right away. It should be, let's see, like right there, okay. Other carved pieces that appear in the photograph, a table, a footstool, and the large display cabinet were also clearly designed by DeForest. Ultimately, the interior of the building was gutted by fire following the earthquake of April 18th, 1906. The brownstone shell survived, however, and today this refurbished building is home to the Union Pacific Club. In 1888, DeForest turned his attention to building his own house at 70s 10th Street in New York City, which survives today as the Bromfman Center for Jewish Life at New York University. The 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago sparked a second wave of interest in his Indian rooms and there were other projects that I don't have time to discuss today. By 1900, however, the demand for his exotic interiors had waned and even this well-illustrated spread in the house beautiful did not stimulate the market. By 1903, a year after the Carnegie Commission, the business was quiet enough that DeForest could let it go for long stretches and spend his winters in Santa Barbara, California. For a while, he considered moving his decorating business to the West Coast. However, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 convinced him otherwise and that year, he approached Tiffany Studios inquiring as to whether they would be willing to purchase his business. By 1907, the deal was negotiated and by 1908, Tiffany Studios received DeForest's inventory of carved teak. Tiffany did not continue to cultivate the ties to the Hotty Sink family in Ahmedabad, but he did use DeForest's materials lavishly for at least one, namely Wildwood, a house designed by Bernard Maybeck and built for real estate developer Frank Colton and his second wife, Leela Rand, I'm sorry, Frank Colton Havens and his second wife, Leela Rand Havens in Piedmont, California. The house appears to have been constructed and decorated between 1908 and 1915 and it still retains the spectacular East Indian drawing room and dining room shown here. Not surprisingly, Tiffany also used DeForest's carved teak at Laurelton Hall as he had previously in his early interior designs and in his New York City home. Laurelton Hall was Tiffany's vast estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island. DeForest hoped would become a museum and in fact, the facade of Tiffany's art gallery of 1918, which stood on the grounds of Laurelton Hall was embellished with DeForest's carved teakwood. It resembled a house facade from Ahmedabad that DeForest had successfully sold to the South Kensington Museum in 1881. Tiffany's art gallery is also now gone, although remarkably, this Ahmedabad house facade was returned from London to Ahmedabad. As you can now see, many of Lockwood DeForest's East Indian rooms are long gone. It is most wonderful to see the Carnegie Family Library so beautifully restored and able to showcase the fine teakwood carving that inspired a career and created a legacy. Thank you very much. Thank you, Roberta and Gail for such interesting talks. And now I hope to be able to continue up to the level of my colleagues. Needless to say, this has been an incredibly exciting time for all of us. And to see this room come back to life and to be able finally to see it with contents that reflect the spirit of the room. Whatever we do with it, I think we will have learned from various exhibitions there that Lockwood DeForest belongs in the room and is the room and provides the spirit for what we do there. I also want to thank very much another colleague, Heather Ewing who wrote this book, A Life of a Mansion, which is new with our reopening. And Gail and I did a lot of research for that and provided content, but Heather has put this all together and done some wonderful research that very much informs my talk this evening. So once again, we introduced the house and the library as you know, faced out to this side, the 91st Street side. And so had a North light, which is generally slightly less, somewhat less than the Southern side, which I think was appropriate given the nature of the room. It owns its existence and its spirit to three men in particular with a fourth also. And those are Lockwood DeForest himself, Andrew Carnegie and Howard Russell Butler. Howard Russell Butler was like DeForest, a painter, but and who had also gotten into the world of decorating and decorating as it meant then was really more a case of supervising contractors and finding people to design and make rather than actually making decorating decisions of the kind that we might associate with today's decorators. That kind of that profession really didn't start until a little late, just slightly later in the 20th century. But Butler had come to know Carnegie somewhat before the house as did DeForest because his father had been on a ship returning from Europe with Andrew Carnegie and made the introduction. And Butler became the founder of the American Society of Artists, which he founded in 1892 having asked Andrew Carnegie and one of the Vanderbilt's and some other key people for funding of the founding members. They're all three were there at the inaugural dinner. The instead of having a stone laying, the New York Times reported that it was much more artistic that they had picked to do a dinner and who was put in charge of planning the sort of decor of the dinner, but Lockwood DeForest. In turn Andrew Carnegie and Howard Russell Butler sat at the head table together. So Butler says in his papers that he was responsible for bringing Carnegie to bringing DeForest on board and as Andrew Carnegie had turned over the management of the decoration of the inside of the house to Butler. Butler at one point was not that well and turned it over to various people to help him. But it is also clear that DeForest was supposed to be part of the package from the beginning. A fourth person was really also part of this group who was as Roberta has referred to Tiffany because he did play such a significant role with lighting and also was part of that same inaugural dinner. In fact, it really was a quite a small world. Mary Garrett had in fact come to Andrew Carnegie to see who was a very good friend of her father's and he had visited down there and she'd come to see about getting money to help be a women's medical college at Johns Hopkins, which he ultimately declined. But nonetheless, Butler had applied to him for monies for various of his projects. I am unaware that DeForest ever asked him for backing in any way. But there are, as I said, there are a great number of connections. The in fact, the dinner, the founding dinner of the Society of Artists was held in quote unquote the music hall as it was called then, which of course was later renamed Carnegie Hall. So that gives you the picture. Carnegie not only underwrote the society but he also provided the news placed to promote the arts in the form of the hall. Again, we see these pictures but you now see the other direction as well, showing that DeForest in fact furnished this with not only the built-in cabinet that you get to see today, but also a library table desk, an armchair and several chairs with upholstery dotted around the room. So in addition, you can obviously see the Turtleback chandelier, Tiffany Turtleback chandelier hanging over the table and let me tell you that is, as Gail said, she wants the painting restored. There'd be nothing I would like better than if somebody would come forth with any Turtleback chandelier that could really add effect to that room. So it also, you will notice and one reason we're able in this case, the only floor that we were able to keep from the original building in the renovation was the teakroom floor and as you can see, certainly during the Carnegie's entire period, it was covered with a carpet, which I am sure came from W and J Sloan because while DeForest had imported carpets, he had also gotten contracts from Sloan to acquire them in India, but on top of that, the Sloans had known the Carnegie's in Scotland and they in fact, Carnegie stayed with them when he first arrived off the boat to begin with but and therefore I, and he then was, they were one of the few people he would sell land to and so North on 91st Street, there are two Sloan houses, the Burden House and the Hammond House, now Sacred Heart and the Russian Consulate, which were Sloan daughters. So this I think all again is part of the same world and of course I think Sloans among many other places probably used DeForest woodwork. A side note on that is that the success that the successor at the Met of Robert DeForest was also from the family. We move on the Sloan family, we move on here where we have the current pictures showing after renovation and before the installation of the exhibition and I think that this is a wonderful opportunity to see the core of both the beautiful cabinet, the woodwork on the bookcases and the detail of the stenciling both on the wall down the bottom left and on the ceiling on the top of the photograph on the right as well as the pattern of the flooring which of course you would have only seen around the borders. It also shows you the fireplace. However, in some ways it's a little, it isn't in the spirit as intended in the way it is now with the exhibition in it. One more picture here which starts to show you the detail where you really get this feeling of intense activity of the patterns and as you may have seen in our making design exhibition one of the elements of design that is featured is pattern and here we see many different patterns all up against each other and yet functioning in a harmonious way. Another couple of views which give you the benefit of seeing the top of the armchair at the desk and also yet another Tiffany lamp over on the octagonal table which is also Lockwood de Forest as you can see portraits of Andrew and Louise up above. On the right this detail which is really almost a still life gives you the opportunity to see a couple of further chairs up against in front of the cabinet behind. So this sort of multitude of patterning is not dissimilar from the environments that de Forest was seeing with the woodwork in India and the stonework. Here I show you an example of not the same Tiffany turtleback chandelier but you can see as this one is lit the effect of the erudite glass and the warm hues in it how it would have in fact been all part of the part of the original vision and you will see yet another Tiffany lamp over on the small octagonal table undoubtedly from India but probably not from the Ahmedabad studio that's in the background. So all of this if you can imagine that the light that is colored coming out when the lamps are lit playing part of this golden hue that's in the stenciling. I just bring this up partly because separate from de Forest and his friendship with and continued work with Tiffany was the fact that Andrew Carnegie in one of his few design interests embraced the stained glass work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. While he was no longer his partner he continued to interact both for the purchase of items and when called for in decorating schemes in both direction but before this house was built Carnegie had you sent to a castle he had bought in Scotland Scebo Castle back in the town where he could now go back as the major success story having been a poor boy in town when he left. So he had this castle where he imported vast numbers of Tiffany lamps. And in fact on the left you will see the Tiffany dragonfly chandelier in the library Scebo Castle. And on the right you see it as Margaret Carnegie Miller his daughter gave it to the museum in the 1970s. So and it's an interesting and telltale moment that this lamp it was always electrified it is not a one that was converted to electricity again showing I think part of what interested Carnegie so much about Tiffany's work was the fact that it was really innovative and very distinctly involved a sort of understanding of the chemistry of how to make this erudized glass which was a better formula than what had been practiced in Central Europe where they'd been doing it earlier but Tiffany improved on the amount of effect that he could create. So Carnegie had this love of Tiffany lamps and they were in fact to be found in old photographs all over the house and which as I said probably had nothing to do with I mean in the sense that the forest didn't need to bring Tiffany in on this case it could be possible that in fact DeForest came to Andrew Carnegie's attention through Tiffany but as we've just seen that necessary either since they were all very much active with the American Society of Artists. One view here of the exhibition shows you an important loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art of a Clock which is a very complicated sort of commission. It is by Tiffany and company, Papa Tiffany coming into the act as he did so often and in fact we have vast amounts of purchases for Tiffany and Coe even in the first trip to India in 1881, 82 when he was there for over a year but this one is a Tiffany and company clock with a Tiffany and company mechanism. It is possible that Louis designed the dial but the mixed metals work is very typical of Tiffany and company and the clock dial and the barometer which are below it are actually of copper with a silver and an enameled metal and brass bronze all mixed together. So you've got definitely Tiffany commissioning the clock but you do have Lockwood DeForest provided panels that are set into this. Interestingly, the back behind where the pendulum should be and you can just see it in this photograph but you will see it's missing in the photograph of the installation and the reason for that was apart from the fact that the pendulum has mercury in it for the barometer and the difficulty of shipping it and it needing a separate crate was the fact that we were really interested in seeing the clock which is the DeForest part of the story and in fact behind the pendulum which you wouldn't normally have seen at all anyway much is carved wood but it's carved mahogany and it has a very definitely exotic feel but in no way is Indian and in fact it has just sort of flamboyant foliage and clearly done by another hand. Other people who became involved in the building as we have found as mainly Heather has found but both of us have found these references that was the firm of DHS and this could explain why we have been having such a difficult time in documenting some of the work in the house because Hess as you can see from this New York Times article of I believe it's 1907 had a huge fire in their Fifth Avenue store. You will see also that they were called decorators and manufacturers of artistic furniture. Clearly DeForest provided all the woodwork but it is very possible that assembling the building cabinet and possibly even the tables the chairs would have been likely to have been sent and had DeForest having somebody to produce those before they came in but the building cabinet and the bookcases may well have been assembled by Hess. The one document that we have that we know they did was that they were responsible for producing the grand staircase and around the grand staircase but as I said the loss of documentation goes a long way. The other firm that was also a candidate for actually doing the assembling in the room is possibly the firm of Inport who worked with Henry Hopson Richardson and others with whom DeForest worked during this period to produce interior woodwork and build in furniture to other architects or designers designs. In addition we have the fact that the one thing that we as I said the one reference we have is Butler's reference in where he says in an illustration of the way in which I was able to save Carnegie money I would mention the woodwork of the whole in the grand staircase six firms competed their estimates ranging from 47 to 125,000. The contract went to Hess and company whom I had recommended and who gave the lowest bid. So actually it's one of the most lavish parts of the house but it in fact came in apparently a lower bid than a lot of the other traditional people there. So this did Carnegie clearly was keeping tabs on the budget and this would have spoken to him definitely but it's also true that the firm was associated with quote unquote artistic work in other words not simply contractors but working with specialist designers. In the course of the researching DeForest for the exhibition it became clear he viewed his role in bringing Indian design to America as much a one of collecting as of creating and the Kashmiri chair while officially had made to his order is in fact typical of some other pieces of European oriented furniture that were being produced and of course when he went up to Lahore and visited John Lockwood Kipling the father of Rudyard he was then the head of an art school there but also had crafts being made. So the likelihood is that certainly DeForest in picking out objects to both this essentially was collecting Kashmiri design in a way that he was putting it into a form that he thought would be useful in the West. Other examples are in the middle of that cabinet is a beadry where Ewer on loan from the Metropolitan Museum. It's an 18th century Ewer and again one that was probably part of a shipment that he made from one of his trips that then was acquired by the museum. His since his brother was president he felt very anxious about, I mean the brother did Robert about not having too many acquisitions directly from Lockwood so frequently gave pieces. Next in the line, I just want to draw to your attention if you go into one of the rooms that the Hewitt sisters is in it was actually Andrew Carnegie's bedroom and here are some details of the Indian teak decoration in that room. There never was a photograph taken of this during the Carnegie's lifetime. So we don't see whether there was anything else in there in terms of the furnishings but I can say that this Andrew Carnegie would not have allowed this to be in his bedroom if he hadn't been, yeah, you know. So lastly we have, I mean not lastly but just at the same time is the 19 three deli exhibition publication showing again the various things from the DeForest workshop at the Huttessing workshop in Ahmedabad going to quickly skip through these since we seemed to have gotten behind time and to show you again here we have a panel in stone from the tomb of Mehud Begata Sarkesh Rosa in Ahmedabad of the mid 16th century compared with the panels in Woodwork. So again the medium sometimes changed but I also want to make another point. This cabinet could clearly shows that the basic court cupboard form which was traditionally English and American of the 17th century is the inspiration for the form of this. It's the ornamentation and the organization that turn it into Indian, the Indian elements. Likewise, this is just to show you briefly a key part of this story. Here is a panel that is of one of the Lockwood forest panels that he took a whole set with him or two sets with him for his shop and his business and then had the studio retain one. So as you can see on the bottom right there's a number four on the back of this panel that enabled him to order up 150 linear feet of pattern number four for any given contract. While he did add some paneling in the 1890s trip almost all that was the last of any changes. I am good the another example is discussing the thickness of the wood and interestingly after Tiffany takes over the studio he goes and tries to get even thinner panels made and the Huddessings tell him that they're not gonna take responsibility for them breaking in transit. Other combinations, this is difficult to do in such a time but the window of the brass foils you see a wonderful combination of Western window with the use of these foils and the foils that he had I just wanna quickly go through. Here is an example that is a recent acquisition and a gift again of Sullivan Goss shows you that he used these foils in a variety of shapes and so forth but he would pick up the motif. It was about motifs and using them in various media. I will not cover this gain except to show you the panel on loan from the Indianapolis Museum which is the red sadstone panel. One of the ones of the type you saw in the photograph that Roberta showed and you can see a screen, a Jolly screen actually from Fattapur Sikri, a photograph that I took when there directly above it showing the inspiration. I gathered from Amy Poster who's here and Kristen Krauss who's here that these came in the Indianapolis Museum who understood them to be 16th century when they originally came in but of course these were among the panels that DeForest commissioned and here in fact is the account for the shipment of 27 cases of agra stonework along with silver that says it was specifically for Tiffany already early. And then lastly, I just wanted to show you some jewelry. One of the major stories that really hasn't been discussed enough is how much jewelry DeForest both collected and in fact had made at his command. The Huttessings were not only woodworkers and stoneworkers, their carvers obviously worked in multiple media, the little niche upstairs that shows me to DeForest carved in ivory along with the carved wood around the outside shows that they had many skills but the metal workers also were able to work with work in jewelry but the extraordinary thing about this collection for the Field Museum, it was all bought, we have lengthy accounts from DeForest of his work, of his buying these things as he traveled around India in 1892 on an extended trip and the principal aim was to buy a great number of pieces. In fact he provided 250 to Tiffany who bought them and then it showed them at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. The residue which was a great number that was not sold there, went to the Field Museum complete when I saw them with a number of tags saying that they were from Gujarat or Kashmir or wherever which is a great help in terms of identifying the styles and locations of the jewelry. There she is with the carved ivory and I just wanted to show the silver cake saw that we acquired a few years ago because what do you see on it? It's a typical 1860 to 70ish sort of cake saw but what's different about it is the engraving on the blade that shows tents, palm trees and mountains and I have to hypothesize that that may be from a sketch by Lockwood DeForest and who and it's engraved Mita on the handle and descended in the family so I think that she's being sort of given a present with great congratulations from her husband for bearing it with the tents, the fleas, the mice and other things that went along with it. Another, as it said, better views of the beadry and the silver filigree box also from the Mets and then lastly just to show you that on the right we have a detail of the stenciling. The stenciling is on canvas, on the walls. The stenciling on the ceiling which is more like a textile pattern is on a panel of wood so they had very different conservation challenges but you will see on the cover of his book Illustrations of Design published 10 years after the wall it's essentially the same idea using motifs but in the case of the book it was an instructional book on how you may take these motifs and use them in all aspects of design and so that is so much what we are looking at in making design at Cooper Hewitt and what we are looking at design history about is how many motifs and how many similarities talk to each other across the ages. Thank you. Hi, so I know you all have many, many questions. We can only take a couple of questions so that you can get your coats from the coat check. I know I have a ton but I'm gonna let the audience have a chance to ask a few things. Yes, over here please. Yes, I'd like to know if there are still I don't think there are very many but the owner of the studio is still a member of the Huddison family and he is primarily a textile designer as are so many of his family in that business but he did tell me that he had started up a woodworking studio. Oh, sorry, the owner of the studio now, a member of the Huddison family, Umang Huddison told me when I was there that he was starting up and has now had some work done by craftsmen whom he's developing and he said but he said that it's not been as continuous a line as it has been with the textiles and some of the metal work where they've had continuous activity. And Charles, the Yorkies commission I think it is pronounced and the short answer is I was not able to find any but we know about that commission it was described. What happened to the table in the middle of the library? I wish we did. Again, it rather surprisingly or perhaps not so, when Mrs. Carnegie died in 1941 or two, the contents were dispersed among relatives. They had only one daughter, Margaret Carnegie Miller, who lived in the townhouse that's now the museum offices but they had a number of cousins and other relatives and of course she had several children. So, but what happened exactly is unclear to those tables because there were some items sold and those are not in the sale lists. So it's possible they were left there. It's possible that staff were given them or told that they could take them out. No one knows that we've been able to determine. I'm curious to know how Lockwood Forest in New York City in 1899 would communicate with the Hattasing family in Mdabad and the buildings being built and the measurement from the east wall to the west wall is 19 feet six inches. So Hattasing says Hattasing receives the drawings. Lockwood Forest says, listen, there's a site change. It's not 19 feet six inches, it's 18 feet. So what does Hattasing do? Does he cut the neck off of the trunk of the elephant or does he, I wonder how it worked in terms of communicating between two countries and it's like 1890, the ships going by. Oh, is there a prototype made of? I'm quite sure based on the amount of extra paneling that survived in his barn slash garage that he ordered more than he need and of course it was cut on site. And one very clever thing that he did is he virtually never used any figural designs. It's almost all vines and foliage and things like that. So it means that it makes it much flower heads. It makes it much easier to cut. There's no risk of having to cut a figure in half. But the answer to your question about communication is the archives of American art has DeForest's archives. Roberta researched them thankfully. Extensively I've done some additional work with them but they involve a great number of letters. It's slightly surprising that there is less about any specific commissions. DeForest does not talk much about most of his commissions but it's so, and usually the clients unless it was Tiffany are not mentioned to the Huffsings. I'm really curious from Gail. Did Lockwood DeForest create drawings for his decorative pieces? Like I love seeing his paintings and I was wondering how that flows into his work as a decorator and perhaps draftsman or not. Sorry. Drawings for his decorative pieces. They exist a bit in his papers. But I don't, do you know of any that are owned publicly or privately? You know, this was surprising to me. I mean like how did, speaking to the gentleman's question like how did he communicate his desire to these amazing craftsmen and almondabod or did they wing it? Well I do think that we don't have a lot. I think they were wing it. Some, some. I mean for instance the western style parlor furniture that DeForest designed it seems like those are basically sketchbook drawings and we actually do have those. They're at the archives of American art with dimensions and he gives a sort of overall form. This is what I want. But I think he basically trusts his craftsmen to produce something that is akin to what he wants in terms of the specific carvings. And the ornamentation. Yes, yes, that's them. And then the only piece that I remember that was like, and again this has been a few years ago, but when I was spending time at the archives of American art, there actually was a full scale drawing of a chair. So in some instances he may have, again communicated with more detailed drawings when there was something important. I'm sure that the church mantle for instance probably came with a little bit more instruction. I think Gail has something to add than I have to close the evening so we can get your coat. As you were talking, I just remembered that a dealer has a full scale fragment of a full scale drawing. Does it mean a one to one? Yes, yes. But it is in pretty poor condition. We'll take it. But interesting. He's selling it, unfortunately. I wish he would gift it up. It's of a floral pattern, what you can see. Wonderful. Well thank you all so much. I know we could talk all night and thank you guys for amazing, what really inspiring work.