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John Henry Belter's Miscellanea

John Henry BelterWorktableFirescreen

John Henry Belter's Miscellanea
John Henry Belter's Miscellanea
belter-worktable Those of you who visit this site regularly and/or are John Henry Belter furniture fans are very familiar with his over-the-top Rococo parlor furniture - tables, chairs, settees, meridiennes... But there are, of course, other forms of furniture out there that Belter made that you can run across from time to time, but you need to know how to spot them if they are not signed in some way. If it were not labeled properly, my guess is that many of us would walk right by this worktable in an antiques store and never know it was made in his very famous shop in the mid-nineteenth century (I assume he made more than just this one and that there are more out there). I'm hoping that by writing this blog entry, staring at the photo, it will become embedded in my brain so that when I run across one sitting there unassumingly in a random antique shop I visit, I will know where it came from. It may not be a masterpiece and I may be crazy, but to me, owning any Belter piece is an honor. A work table like this one is pictured on page 83 of the Belter book, which states that a table like this one and a bed were used by Belter in a home furnished from his own shop. This worktable was in the sale yesterday and sold for a measley $900. There was also a firescreen that was attributed to Belter that sold for $28,000.
John Henry Belter's Miscellanea

4 comments

  1. Bart
    I though many of the furniture prices were quite low. A very nice Hunzinger rocker went for a mere $475.
  2. zeke
    I think, because we mostly see museum examples, we get used to seeing the "Best" of the major Victorian furniture makers works. I'm sure these shops catered to a large group of buyers in more than one economic range. There must be a lot of unlabled, unattributed pieces out there by many of the major makers.
  3. Preston
    Who made the two settees in the Lincoln bedroom in the Presidential White House?
  4. misslilybart
    According to the press coverage of the re-decoration of the Lincoln Bed and Sitting Rooms several years ago, the settees are Belter and were donated to the White House by the Winterthur Museum.

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