1. 19th-Century America: Furniture and Other Decorative Arts (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), cat. nos. 209–12. 2. Several articles have appeared on specific aspects of Herter Brothers, but the two most complete sources for the firm prior to this publication under review remain a small exhibition pamphlet by David Hanks and references within a larger exhibition catalogue for an exhibition on the aesthetic movement: Christian Herter and the Aesthetic Movement in America (New York: Washburn Gallery, 1980); and Doreen Bolger Burke et al., In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986). 3. Henry Hawley, “Four Pieces of American Furniture: An ‘Aesthetic’ Sidechair,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 10 (December 1982): 330–32, 338–39. 4. Charles Venable, Silver in America, 1840–1940: A Century of Splendor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 5. For example, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Ian Hodder, ed., The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 6. For example, see Deborah Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and Davira Taragin, Edward Cooke, Jr., and Joseph Giovannini, Furniture by Wendell Castle (New York: Hudson Hills, 1989), esp. pp. 60–94.