Description:
Pier table made by Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779–1819), a French-born cabinetmaker, who lived and worked in New York City. In Lannuier's time, the style of his furniture was described as "French Antique." The social unrest and disruption of the economy by the French Revolution caused Lannuier to emigrate to America in 1803. In Paris, Lannuier worked primarily in mahogany, with limited amounts of satinwood and rosewood veneer inlays. Early pieces show the influence of late Louis XVI-style furniture. After moving to the United States, Lannuier benefitted from the more stable economy and access to exotic hardwoods, which allowed him to work on a larger scale using solid pieces of precious woods. Lannuier's furniture is characterized by its use of architectural motifs–-columns, brackets, pediments, and pilasters; Greek and Roman motifs including anthemions, lyres, caryatids, dolphins, laurel wreaths, and winged figures. Federal motifs associated with the early Republic include eagles and five- or six-pointed stars. Large figures were carved and gilded, while smaller decorative mounts were cast in bronze and gilded. Lannuier's earlier work included sideboards, commodes, worktables, dining tables and chairs, and game tables. As the Empire style became more entrenched, and his success grew, Lannuier produced larger, more expensive pieces including sofas, cylinder desks, and bedsteads. On the reverse of some of the cast-brass ornaments are the initials "PEG" for P.E. Guerin, a New York brass foundry that had been in operation in New York since 1857. The looking glass is also a modern replacement. George Alfred Cluett (1873-1955), of Troy, New York, and Williamstown, Massachusetts, collected American furniture from around 1901, shortly after he and Edith Tucker were married, through the mid-1920s. Cluett was prominent among early collectors. For the first museum exhibition of American furniture, The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909, Cluett loaned 22 objects. Cluett, whose family business became Arrow Shirts, finished collecting before Henry Francis DuPont began to amass objects for what became the core of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The Cluett family donated most of its collection to Historic Deerfield beginning in 1960, with its last gifts given in 2003. Cluett’s keen connoisseurship, focused on Classical objects (contemporary to his grandparents’ lives) is notable as he collected before the publication of the first seminal reference books on American antiques. Moreover, the early twentieth-century collectors focused on the so-called Pilgrim Century, which predates the Classical era by over one hundred years. Cluett was particularly intrigued by the work of craftsmen including Seymour, McIntire, Phyfe, and Lannuier. Cluett’s desire for privacy, and reverence for times past has long obscured his creative connoisseurship and legacy as one of the earliest and influential collectors of American furniture.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2003.21.31 |
