This desk is being attributed to the shop of Allen and Brother of Philadelphia and being dated to around 1875.  I happen to have seen this desk in person - it sat in Adamstown, PA for a number of months and I drooled over the carved griffins on the base, but I couldn’t part with the cash that was being asked for it.

I’m not completely sold on this being by Allen and Brother as it doesn’t fully resemble items that I’ve seen by them before and I think the style of the carved griffins is the reason why it was attributed to them.  The pulls especially don’t say Allen to me but they could have been replaced and I am no expert who knows their full repertoire, anyway.

We’ve seen so many lion-headed griffins from Horner, Mitchell, and Karpen, etc., that we don’t recognize a true griffin when we see one, as is present on this desk.  As a result, the seller identified these figures as sphinxes, which usually have the head of a human, which these do not.  Griffins, going back to antiquity, have the head of a bird; most often an Eagle.

Bidding on the desk will start at $2,000 and the expected range will be $4,000 to $6,000.  More images at the listing.

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I’m a big fan of all styles and eras of Victorian furniture and my interests even leak into the immediately preceding and following eras.

Not wanting this site to be all about Renaissance Revival and Rococo, I’m always on the lookout for nice pieces in any Victorian style.  It’s just that there are more examples of the former, and less Aesthetic, Egyptian Revival, etc., floating around in the marketplace - that are of mentionable quality.

Misslilybart, in the forum, spotted this chair coming up at the 9/7 Brunk auction and had this to say about it:

It appears to be identical to one at the High Museum (see Art & Enterprise: American Decorative Art, 1825-1917 The Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection, page 265, Plate 146). The High catalog does not make any attribution beyond “Probably New York,” but they do note that it is comparable to work executed for the William H. Vanderbilt House by Herter Brothers (these chairs, in particular), and that the mixed-media marquetry is similar to that of known pieces by Herts Brothers. Continue Reading »

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More Victorian Antiques ...

Tags: Aesthetic Movement, Anglo-Japanese, desk, ebonized, inlaid, side chair

I thought I’d share two photos of Herter Brothers pieces from my recent Philadelphia Museum of Art trip. You’ll have to excuse the photography as it was with a camera that was foreign to me and since the Herters’ pieces were behind glass, I think it created some challenges for the auto-focus.

The first photo shows a Herter Brothers half-tester bed and a side-char.

The next photo shows an inlaid table attributed to Herter Brothers.  You can see the bottom left corner of what is a large wall mirror that I should have photographed, but the camera was running out of juice.

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