Description:
Pole screen or fire screen with an embroidered floral motif in a molded frame with an adjustable catch on a baluster-turned shaft mounted on three cabriole legs with asymmetrical foliate carving terminating in ball and claw feet. The design and carving style of the shaft and legs of this pole screen suggest New York origins. The framed needlework picture is believed to be American and is original to the screen. Pole screens are relatively rare in American furniture. Ostensibly, they protected one's face (that might be made up with paraffin-based cosmetics anong the well-to-do) from the heat of the fire. More to the point, they offered an ostentatious means of displaying fancy needlework. 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.
Subjects:
Textile fabrics; Mahogany Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+85.023 |
