Armchair with elaborate carved features and open work, with folate trailing vine motif along virtually all surfaces, intricately carved top rail crest (with old repair) and center finial, with janus mask support bust finials over the ears, finely carved back posts, columnar supports and stretchers; long carved arms terminating in exceptionally well carved lion-headed handholds with open mouths, the underside of each impressed N19; the lower portion of the chair braced by four stretchers, each carved on three sides with the undersides bearing the same N19 impression as the undersides of the arms, above elephant feet, brass caster swivels and rubber casters, each marked 20.  The chair was shoddily reupholstered some time after 1967, possibly more than once. Height 46", overall depth 33", seat depth and width 24 1/2", seat height 17".

The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company came to be in 1881 as a result of several enterprising international partnerships and a deep tradition of Gujarati wood carving. 

Lockwood de Forest partnered with Louis Comfort Tiffany on a venture, Tiffany & De Forest, to source decorative ornaments and jewelry from around Asia back to New York to adorn the city mansions and country houses of the emerging class of Gilded Age industrialists.  

De Forest and his new wife, Meta, took an extended honeymoon/buying trip, traveling around India from 1881-1883, sending all manner of treasures back to Tiffany.  Inspired by the teak architecture he encountered in Gujarat, de Forest began designing panels, architectural elements, and furniture to be carved in a blend of Western and Eastern design aesthetics.  

De Forest was most captivated by the carving around Ahmedabad; an old city where whole sections were undergoing abandonment as skilled workers and merchants moved followed the industrialization of West India’s larger cities.  De Forest partnered with Mugganbhai Hutheesing, whom he had met on his first visit to India two years prior.  Hutheesing’s family had deep roots in Ahmedabad, as the owners of the workshop and patrons of the mistri, the traditional carvers.  

De Forest gave Hutheesing broad-brush designs for carved panels, architectural pieces, and furniture, leaving the detailing up to the traditional carvers.  

The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company began producing and shipping pieces for Tiffany and de Forest while de Forest was still in the country, in 1882.  Even with low Indian wages, this custom material was more expensive than de Forest and Tiffany had hoped, and its practical appeal was limited to whims of the tastes of America’s wealthiest families. 

A Note on Attribution: De Forest’s correspondences, business documents, and sketchbooks are largely in tact and available to the public through the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art.  Unfortunately the archives of the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company were lost to fire, and most of Hutheesing’s carvers will likely remain anonymous.  While the design of this chair certainly originates with de Forest, and it was made on his commission, it is now standard to co-credit these pieces as Made by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company.  Zach Silvia writes about this change in how de Forest’s pieces are attributed in “All-Over Design and the complicated life of Bryn Mawr’s Lockwood de Forest collection” (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Bryn Mawr College, May 21, 2020), and curator Nina Blomfield’s particular choice of language:

“For Nina (Blomfield), one of the difficulties in curating “All-Over Design” was deciding who to credit on object labels. De Forest’s writings show that he regarded the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company carvers as highly skilled designers, who were able to produce intricate carvings autonomously and without reference to predetermined plans. Yet since he also never names the carvers, their individual identities have been lost. Nina felt that giving de Forest sole credit for many of the objects in Bryn Mawr’s collection would be a re-enactment of this erasure. Instead, each object label reads “Made by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company” – to shift the balance, acknowledge the collective production of these objects, and to highlight de Forest’s role more as broker or middleman in an exchange of objects between India and the United States.” 

*Lion head armchairs in the photographic record from the homes of Robert and Emily de Forest, Washington Square North, New York, the Flood Mansion in Knob Hill, San Francisco, and Lockwood de Forest’s own house and collection, as illustrated in de Forest's Indian Domestic Architecture, Boston, Heliotype Printing Co., 1885, plate XIX, and in the photograph from Lockwood Kipling used in William Henry Sheldon's article about de Forest in The Most Indian House in America, The House Beautiful, 1888, p421.

*Two armchairs (Deanery.360 and Deanery.361) discussed and illustrated in the analysis below; from the collection of Bryn Mawr College, from M. Cary Thomas, originally owned by Mary Elizabeth Garrett 

*The accompanying side chairs from that same parlor suite; one currently in the Bryn Mawr College collection (Deanery.368), the other in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Accession# 1992.340; from Margot Johnson, likely from Garrett.

Acquired by our consignor's grandfather, of Troy, NH and later Jaffrey, NH in the 1950's or early 1960's along with the hexagonal table (lot 24) and a settee of the same set, which is no longer present. Family photographic records show these pieces in everyday usage in this family home, beginning in the early 1960's.  

It is believed by the family that these pieces were acquired locally, either as gifts or purchases. We believe it's possible that they came from the de Forest family, as Alfred de Forest, Lockwood de Forest's son and notable MIT engineer, and his wife Izette Taber de Forest, owned a farm in the adjacent town, Marlborough, NH, from the late 1930's until Izette's passing in 1965. 

Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 18751900 by Amelia Peck

Tiffany and de Forest 1879-1882. Tiffany & De Forest," October i, 1880, Dun Credit Ledger, New York, vol. 388

Roberta Mayer: Understanding the Mistri: The Arts and Crafts of Lockwood De Forest (1850-1932)

Roberta Mayer. Lockwood de Forest : furnishing the Gilded Age with a passion for India, 2008

Roberta Mayer. Lockwood and Meta de Forest in India, Kashmir, and Nepal

Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1/2, Travel (SPRING 2013), pp. 44-57 (14 pages)

Sarah Coffin, Cooper Hewitt: Adding India: Lockwood de Forest’s Contributions to Olana’s Interiors, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhYojC26PPY

Sarah Coffin, Gail Davidson, Roberta Mayer; Cooper Hewitt: Lockwood de Forest: Passion for the Exotic, lecture 2014 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_E7llb6AU&t=4754s

Naqsh : the art of wood carving in traditional houses of Gujarat, a focus on ornamentation

by Thakkar, Jay, 1976- author:  In trying to learn more about the carving traditions of Ahmedabad, I came across Jay Thakkar’s excellent reference Nash: the Art of Wood Carving in Traditional Houses of Gujarat, a focus on ornamentation.  In this work, he illustrates a lion (sinha) formed facade bracket from the Ramji Temple, Gol Sheri, Patan, and notes that in the tradition of the Vedas and Bhagvat Gita, “the lion symbolizes contemplative action, gold, sun, the active, directive and creative principle within all beings.”

Please email for a PDF condition report, with photos. Or see condition notes and photos below near the bottom of this page.