Cabinet

This piece embodies the idea that “more is more.” Designed to convey their owners’ wealth and taste, such cabinets were used to display equally sumptuous works of art, such as elaborate clocks or vases. All of New York’s leading cabinetmakers made similar pieces, which were called “French cabinets,” as they were based (loosely) on French courtly styles of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This cabinet  integrates--among other elements--classically inspired columns, Italian Renaissance-style marquetry panels and console brackets, and a French porcelain plaque with a French-inspired metal surround.

During the 1860s and 1870s, fashionable furniture moved away from the sculptural Rococo Revival styles of the 1850s toward a revival of classical elements from various historical sources. The new style drew from the architectural forms of the Renaissance, the French Neoclassical furniture of the eighteenth century, and the French Second Empire. This drawing-room cabinet, stamped in multiple places "N. GUSTAFFSON," has a tripartite shape divided by scrolled pilasters, concave side panels, and a flat pedestal on top intended for displaying a work of art, perhaps a clock or sculpture. It uses a decorative vocabulary seen in other furniture forms of the period, including ebonized elements (painted black to resemble ebony), incised and gilt linear decoration, contrasting exotic woods, marquetry (decorative inlaid wood) panels, and bronze, gilt-bronze, and porcelain plaques.Although little is known about Nelson Gustafson, who is listed in New York City directories only from 1873 to 1875, he evidently ran a shop producing luxury furniture that required the contributions of many craftsmen. The marquetry panels may have been imported from France. The gilt-bronze mounts are stamped "P.E.G.," for P. E. Guerin, a New York firm founded in 1857 by French-born immigrant Pierre Emmanuel Guerin. Guerin specialized in producing French-style bronze medallions and hardware, and he successfully competed with imported ornamental hardware by offering locally made custom work to New York manufacturers.This text was adapted from Ward, et al., MFA Highlights: American Decorative Arts & Sculpture (Boston, 2006) available at www.mfashop.com/mfa-publications.html.