Herter Brothers (February/March 1995 | Volume: 46, Issue: 1)

Herter Brothers

AH article image

Authors: William Hosley

Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

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February/March 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 1

America. The industrial age. Machines, steam, and iron. The picture of progress. But also a nation in mourning. Mourning its Civil War dead, mourning its loss of innocence, and deeply ambivalent about the forces of change. Onto this stage stepped two dapper German cosmopolites—Gustave and Christian Herter—impresarios of interior design and cabinetmakers to the stars. In three centuries of American furniture, there has never been an artist or craftsman who so shaped the taste of the rich and aspiring or whose work so epitomized its age as Herter Brothers. Through its art, Herter Brothers helped America’s newly rich come to terms with their success and, indeed, to flaunt it. Herter’s legacy is one of startling achievement, and it vindicates what is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood epoch in American art.

 
 

Herter Brothers is currently the subject of an impressive exhibition, the result of a collaboration between the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is the third installment in a 25-year program with which the Metropolitan’s American Wing and a constellation of colleagues, collectors, and friends have reclaimed from the junk pile of history the art of America’s brilliant and resourceful adolescence.

WHO BOUGHT THIS EBULLIENT FURNITURE? AMERICA’S VICTORIAN NOUVEAUX RICHES, GROPING FOR RESPECTABILITY AND UNPREPARED FOR THE PUBLIC GAZE AT THEIR PRIVATE LIVES.
 

Shaker simplicity it is not. But who says Shaker rules? The persistent rivalry between modern and traditional art, elegance and excess, form and ornament, has so colored popular taste that the very word Victorian conjures up associations that still make some people cringe. It is convenient when taste leans toward that which is relatively easy (and cheap) to make. But if there is virtue in taking the longer, steeper road, then the furniture of Herter Brothers represents the pinnacle of American achievement in decorative art. Their swirls and pirouettes of virtuosity, the persistence of their innovation, and the sheer audacity of building bigger and bolder forms in wood—and every other material under the sun—make Herter Brothers the premier innovators in furniture design, in an age that took its furniture very seriously.

Gustave Herter, the elder brother and founder of the partnership, was a “forty-eighter”—the victim of and refugee from the political and economic upheavals that rolled across Europe in 1848, spawning the largest wave of immigrants yet to arrive on American shores. The son of a Stuttgart ébéniste —a cabinetmaker specializing in veneer and inlay—he planted an inheritance of skill in the free trade soil of New York’s thriving antebellum furniture industry. Variously described as a sculptor and woodcarver, Gustave Herter rose swiftly to prominence. In 1853, he gained notoriety and acclaim by exhibiting a monumental carved oak sideboard at New York’s Crystal Palace exhibition. By the end of the decade, he had become an industrialist employing