Lockwood de Forest

Lockwood de Forest

Lockwood de Forest (born June 23, 1850 in New York City , New York , † April 3, 1932 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American interior designer and painter and one of the representatives of the American Aesthetic Movement .

Life

De Forest came from a wealthy New York family who owed their fortune to shipping to South America and the Caribbean . He grew up in Manhattan in the family townhouse and in the summer on the country estate on Long Island with his three siblings. The art-loving parents imparted this quality to all children.

First years of painting

In 1868 de Forest visited Rome and received lessons from the Italian landscape painter Hermann Corrodi . Here he met his maternal great-uncle, the painter Frederick Edwin Church , with whom he made a tour of Italy, drawing and painting. The uncle became his mentor and the two continued working together after their return to the United States in 1869.

De Forest rented a studio in the newly built Tenth Street Studio Building in Manhattan in 1872 . In the following years he met the artists Sanford Robinson Gifford , John Frederick Kensett , Jervis McEntee and Walter Launt Palmer in New York . His success as a painter was not very great. In 1872 he exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. In the years 1875 to 1878 he made two painting trips to Europe , the Middle East and North Africa .

Interior designer and entrepreneur

In his mid-twenties, de Forest became familiar with the areas of interior design and design, as well as architecture, through the Persian-style country estate of his great-uncle Church, Olana on the Hudson River north of New York, and its extensive library. His first project in these areas was the remodeling of his parents' townhouse in Greenwich Village in 1876.

In 1879 De Forest became a partner of the Associated Artists company founded by the artists Louis Comfort Tiffany , Samuel Colman and Candace Wheeler , in which he was responsible for the production of wooden components for interior decoration. In the same year he married and went on a three-year "honeymoon" trip to India with his wife. The couple collected furniture, textiles and jewelry and founded the Ahmadabad Woodcarving Company in Ahmadabad in Gujarat in collaboration with the Hutheesing family of traders . This company became important in the years to come for the manufacture of load-bearing, carved wooden parts and furniture for the American market. The Associated Artists only existed for four years, but had a major influence on the aestheticism of the American style through the emphasis on manual work and skills, the connection of colors with surface structures and the development of exotic but tasteful themes in interior design.

When de Forest founded his own design company in New York in 1892, he set up a sales room at No. 9, East 17th Street in Manhattan. He was responsible for the designs, overseeing production in India and importing the manufactured parts, but also continued to design interior fittings and load-bearing parts of the interior fittings. His works were shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886 , as well as at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 . Through these exhibitions he became very well known and received orders e.g. B. by Andrew Carnegie for furnishing his library and bedroom in his Manhattan home that now houses the Cooper Hewitt Museum . He received further orders from the transport magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes , the Chicago businessman Potter Palmer and the author Mark Twain .

Later life and death

At the turn of the century de Forest began to paint again, exhibited from 1898 onwards at the Century Association and at the National Academy of Design . There was no demand for interior furnishings in the aesthetic style, as new styles such as Art Nouveau were favored. He spent the winters from 1902 onwards in his own home in Santa Barbara, California on the west coast of the USA. The mild climate and the coasts of the Pacific took him prisoner. He spent the years up to his death painting and traveling to the unspoilt areas of the USA, Alaska and Mexico .

Exhibitions

• 1988: Lockwood de Forest: Alaska Oil Sketches , Alaska State Museum , Juneau , Alaska , USA.
• 2011/2012: Night and Day: The Paintings of Lockwood de Forest , Palm Springs Art Museum .

Publications

• Indian Architecture and Ornament . GH Polley & Co. Boston 1880.
• Illustrations of Design, based on Notes of Line as used by the Craftsmen of India . Gun & Company, Boston / New York 1912.

literature

• Exhibition catalog: Lockwood de Forest. Alaska Oil Sketches , Alaska State Museum, Juneau, Alaska, USA 1988.
• Lionel Lambourne: The Aesthetic Movement , Phaidon Press, London 1996, ISBN 0-7148-3000-3 .
• Andreas Strobl: De Forest, Lockwood . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 25, Saur, Munich a. a. 2000, ISBN 3-598-22765-5 , p. 188.
• Roberta A. Mayer: Lockwood de Forest: Furnishing de Gilded Age with a Passion for India . University of Delaware Press, Newark, New Jersey, USA 2008, ISBN 978-0-874139730 .

Web links

• Website about the artist
• Exhibition 2012 in Palm Springs