Barbara Veith and Medill Higgins Harvey, eds. Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863–82. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum and Hirmer, 2021. 208 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., bibliography. $50.
In 1970, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized its ground-breaking exhibition on nineteenth-century American art, the furniture of Kimbel and Cabus received only a brief mention in the preamble to the decorative arts volume, as is recognized by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen in the introduction to this new volume devoted to the firm. Kimbel and Cabus was acknowledged then in half a sentence merely for its “centennial furniture” of ebonized cherry produced in the 1870s. Half a century later, after emerging slowly through a long process of research and discovery, this distinguished New York partnership, active from 1863 to 1882, has finally been given a full-dress catalogue that firmly places it in the pantheon of significant New York City furniture shops in the period. This book honors the legacy of the late Dr. Barry R. Harwood of the Brooklyn Museum, a curator, scholar, and professor whose longstanding interest in and knowledge of the firm is abundantly evident in this publication. Barbara Veith of the Brooklyn Museum inherited the torch after Barry’s passing and, with the assistance of Medill Higgins Harvey of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and others, completed this admirable catalogue in his memory.[2]
Modern Gothic begins with two short essays: one by Max Donnelly of the Victoria and Albert Museum on the English and German design sources for the firm’s work; and another by Melitta Jonas, a German art historian, on the European background of the Kimbel family. Each essay establishes an international context for the firm and its principals. Veith and Harvey then get down to business in a detailed, virtually forensic biography of the company and its principals, Anton Kimbel (1822–1895) from Mainz, Germany, and the lesser-known Joseph Cabus (1824–1898) from Calmoutier, France. Using a stunning variety of public and private documents, photographs, and printed sources, they analyze Kimbel and Cabus from many perspectives. (Locating their passport applications, they learned that Kimbel was 5 feet 11 inches tall and had blue eyes, while the bearded Cabus was a little shorter and might have been losing his hair at age thirty-nine.) Veith and Harvey walk us through the firm’s history over several generations, devoting sections to the firm’s design sources, the diagnostic features of their furniture, the means of its production, and their principal commissions. Kimbel and Cabus, by New York standards of the day, was not a large firm, with fewer than one hundred employees (as compared with Pottier and Stymus, who had more than three hundred workmen, while the shops of Herter Bros. and Alexander Roux were roughly twice the size of Kimbel and Cabus). Its clients included the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in the early 1870s, its earliest documented commission, as well as many private clients—doctors, merchants, and stockbrokers—who considered themselves progressive and “aesthetically adventurous” (p. 76). One of the firm’s last major commissions came in 1879–80, when it furnished the 10th Company K Room at the Seventh Regiment of the New York Militia Armory on Park Avenue. It should be noted that the firm advertised “Furniture at Prices within the Reach of All” in 1868 (p. 48) and that its inventory photographs demonstrate that the firm made objects available at a range of costs. In this book, the high-end products are, understandably, at center stage.
The firm’s clients of all means presumably were attracted by “the eclectic combinations of columns, crockets, crenellations and dentillations, trefoils, incised carving, inset tiles, and bold metal hardware characteristic of Kimbel and Cabus’s distinctive take on the Modern Gothic style” (p. 76). Those characteristics are abundantly evident in the “exhibition objects” section of this catalogue, which contains about thirty-six entries and comprises roughly half the volume.
Kimbel and Cabus has been known primarily through the survival of a photographic trade catalogue of circa 1875 now in the collection of Cooper-Hewitt, and also through images of its work contained in various publications associated with the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. Those sources and many others are put to good use in the catalogue, which presents the variety of forms now attributed to the firm: grandiose cabinets, pedestals, tables, seating furniture (one of their principal areas of production), hanging cabinets, desks, revolving bookstands, sideboards, and étagères. We get to see a humidor with elaborate metal mounts and even a fairly plain bedstead. The objects are often indebted to the designs of Scotsmen Bruce Talbert and Christopher Dresser, Englishman Charles Locke Eastlake, and German architect Edwin Oppler and other members of the Hanoverian school of architecture.
As briefly acknowledged in the introduction, it was partly “exploitation” that made the production of such “luxurious and distinctive” furniture for immensely wealthy clients possible (p. 9), allowing them to indulge in fanciful and highly ornamented household goods. These objects provided an opportunity for a few privileged Americans to participate in an international art movement largely divorced from much of the American experience, allowing them to feel connected to a part of that culture while simultaneously demonstrating, to a certain extent, the country’s ongoing provincialism a century into its existence.
The workforce that produced these objects consisted primarily of German and French immigrants, many of whom worked ten-hour days. A strike in the spring of 1872 included a good many of Kimbel and Cabus’s employees—possibly those of German extraction (p. 51), as speculated here, known for their abilities as labor organizers and advocates. The strike was only a hiccup, however, in two decades of economic success that seem to indicate Kimbel and Cabus did well for their employees as well as for themselves, an apparent immigrant success story on many levels. Although the partnership examined here came to an end in 1882, family members on both sides stayed in the furniture business for years or even decades as taste and the markets evolved.
With this monograph, we now have a more rounded picture of the hothouse atmosphere of the high-end New York furniture trade of the last half of the nineteenth century. Modern Gothic, beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched, places Kimbel and Cabus in the realm of Herter Brothers, George A. Schastey, Leon Marcotte, Alexander Roux, and Pottier and Stymus. Barry Harwood, who contributed his own catalogue on the innovative George Hunzinger to the literature in 1997, assuredly would have been pleased with this definitive study of another of his favorite subjects.
Barbara Veith and Medill Higgins Harvey, eds. Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863–82. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum and Hirmer, 2021. 208 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., bibliography. $50.
In 1970, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized its ground-breaking exhibition on nineteenth-century American art, the furniture of Kimbel and Cabus received only a brief mention in the preamble to the decorative arts volume, as is recognized by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen in the introduction to this new volume devoted to the firm. Kimbel and Cabus was acknowledged then in half a sentence merely for its “centennial furniture” of ebonized cherry produced in the 1870s. Half a century later, after emerging slowly through a long process of research and discovery, this distinguished New York partnership, active from 1863 to 1882, has finally been given a full-dress catalogue that firmly places it in the pantheon of significant New York City furniture shops in the period. This book honors the legacy of the late Dr. Barry R. Harwood of the Brooklyn Museum, a curator, scholar, and professor whose longstanding interest in and knowledge of the firm is abundantly evident in this publication. Barbara Veith of the Brooklyn Museum inherited the torch after Barry’s passing and, with the assistance of Medill Higgins Harvey of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and others, completed this admirable catalogue in his memory.[2]
Modern Gothic begins with two short essays: one by Max Donnelly of the Victoria and Albert Museum on the English and German design sources for the firm’s work; and another by Melitta Jonas, a German art historian, on the European background of the Kimbel family. Each essay establishes an international context for the firm and its principals. Veith and Harvey then get down to business in a detailed, virtually forensic biography of the company and its principals, Anton Kimbel (1822–1895) from Mainz, Germany, and the lesser-known Joseph Cabus (1824–1898) from Calmoutier, France. Using a stunning variety of public and private documents, photographs, and printed sources, they analyze Kimbel and Cabus from many perspectives. (Locating their passport applications, they learned that Kimbel was 5 feet 11 inches tall and had blue eyes, while the bearded Cabus was a little shorter and might have been losing his hair at age thirty-nine.) Veith and Harvey walk us through the firm’s history over several generations, devoting sections to the firm’s design sources, the diagnostic features of their furniture, the means of its production, and their principal commissions. Kimbel and Cabus, by New York standards of the day, was not a large firm, with fewer than one hundred employees (as compared with Pottier and Stymus, who had more than three hundred workmen, while the shops of Herter Bros. and Alexander Roux were roughly twice the size of Kimbel and Cabus). Its clients included the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in the early 1870s, its earliest documented commission, as well as many private clients—doctors, merchants, and stockbrokers—who considered themselves progressive and “aesthetically adventurous” (p. 76). One of the firm’s last major commissions came in 1879–80, when it furnished the 10th Company K Room at the Seventh Regiment of the New York Militia Armory on Park Avenue. It should be noted that the firm advertised “Furniture at Prices within the Reach of All” in 1868 (p. 48) and that its inventory photographs demonstrate that the firm made objects available at a range of costs. In this book, the high-end products are, understandably, at center stage.
The firm’s clients of all means presumably were attracted by “the eclectic combinations of columns, crockets, crenellations and dentillations, trefoils, incised carving, inset tiles, and bold metal hardware characteristic of Kimbel and Cabus’s distinctive take on the Modern Gothic style” (p. 76). Those characteristics are abundantly evident in the “exhibition objects” section of this catalogue, which contains about thirty-six entries and comprises roughly half the volume.
Kimbel and Cabus has been known primarily through the survival of a photographic trade catalogue of circa 1875 now in the collection of Cooper-Hewitt, and also through images of its work contained in various publications associated with the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia. Those sources and many others are put to good use in the catalogue, which presents the variety of forms now attributed to the firm: grandiose cabinets, pedestals, tables, seating furniture (one of their principal areas of production), hanging cabinets, desks, revolving bookstands, sideboards, and étagères. We get to see a humidor with elaborate metal mounts and even a fairly plain bedstead. The objects are often indebted to the designs of Scotsmen Bruce Talbert and Christopher Dresser, Englishman Charles Locke Eastlake, and German architect Edwin Oppler and other members of the Hanoverian school of architecture.
As briefly acknowledged in the introduction, it was partly “exploitation” that made the production of such “luxurious and distinctive” furniture for immensely wealthy clients possible (p. 9), allowing them to indulge in fanciful and highly ornamented household goods. These objects provided an opportunity for a few privileged Americans to participate in an international art movement largely divorced from much of the American experience, allowing them to feel connected to a part of that culture while simultaneously demonstrating, to a certain extent, the country’s ongoing provincialism a century into its existence.
The workforce that produced these objects consisted primarily of German and French immigrants, many of whom worked ten-hour days. A strike in the spring of 1872 included a good many of Kimbel and Cabus’s employees—possibly those of German extraction (p. 51), as speculated here, known for their abilities as labor organizers and advocates. The strike was only a hiccup, however, in two decades of economic success that seem to indicate Kimbel and Cabus did well for their employees as well as for themselves, an apparent immigrant success story on many levels. Although the partnership examined here came to an end in 1882, family members on both sides stayed in the furniture business for years or even decades as taste and the markets evolved.
With this monograph, we now have a more rounded picture of the hothouse atmosphere of the high-end New York furniture trade of the last half of the nineteenth century. Modern Gothic, beautifully illustrated and meticulously researched, places Kimbel and Cabus in the realm of Herter Brothers, George A. Schastey, Leon Marcotte, Alexander Roux, and Pottier and Stymus. Barry Harwood, who contributed his own catalogue on the innovative George Hunzinger to the literature in 1997, assuredly would have been pleased with this definitive study of another of his favorite subjects.
Gerald W. R. Ward
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston