  About the Artwork
  
  
  Philadelphia architect Frank Furness designed this table for the library of his influential client Henry Clay Gibson, a prominent Philadelphia distillery heir and then president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The veneered top of highly figured Circassian walnut is one of the most exuberant uses of an exotic wood in any piece of American nineteenth-century furniture. This use demonstrates the emerging importance in furniture design of the inherent beauty of natural materials, instead of carved or applied elements, serving as the main decorative source.
 
Furness’s prolific career spanned forty-five years, during which he designed hundreds of buildings and, in some cases, designed or selected the furnishings. He played a leading role in American architectural development in the late nineteenth century by creating a highly individualized style that integrated ornamentation with structure. Of his many structures, he is best known for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of 1876. For this building, he created a vibrant exterior color scheme, using various styles of stone and finishes. The exaggerated and stylized medieval motifs, such as hefty corbels, squat columns, chamfered corners, and oversized shingle shapes, characterized Furness’s work of the 1870s and were intended to create symbolic images of power.
 
Early in his career, Furness began to design fixtures, fittings, and furnishings for the interiors of his buildings. Few documented pieces exist. The earliest examples are chairs for the Rodef Shalom synagogue (Philadelphia), a carved desk and chair for his brother, and chairs for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, all in the modern Gothic style.2 Evidence strongly suggests that the Philadelphia furniture maker Daniel Pabst executed many designs for Furness, including this table.
 
Within five years of completing the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Gibson commissioned Furness to design a modern Gothic home. The commission included several significant pieces of furniture, including this table, which incorporates the avant-garde influences of the European reform movements, specifically those led by English designers Christopher Dresser and Charles Eastlake. The top is a book­matched veneer. Coffered drawers rest below the top with lion-mask pulls in the center of each, nearly identical to those on the 1876 Aesop’s Fables Sideboard by Daniel Pabst (Art Institute of Chicago). The base draws its influences directly from Furness’s vocabulary of building ornamentation, with legs that echo squat columns with chamfered corners. Further decoration consists of carved and incised designs representative of the modern Gothic movement, such as the stylized foliated elements, owing their origins to Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament of 1856. James W. Tottis
 
Adapted from Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 81, nos. 1­–2 (2007): 24–25.
 
Notes

1. Artistic Houses; being a series of interior views of a number of the most beautiful and celebrated homes in the United States, with a description of the art treasures contained therein, 4 vols. (New York, 1883–84). See also G. E. Thomas, J. A. Cohen, and M . J. Lewis, Frank Furness: The Complete Works (New York, 1991).
2. J. F. O’Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness (Philadelphia Museum of Art, exh. cat., 1973), 41.
  
  
  Title
  Henry Clay Gibson Clay Library Table
  
  
  Artwork Date
  ca. 1877
  
  
  
  
  Makers
  
  
  Frank Furness  (Designer)
  American, 1839 - 1912
  Daniel Pabst  (Maker)
  American, 1826 - 1910
  
  
  
  Medium
  American black walnut and Circassian walnut
  
  
  Dimensions
  Overall: 29 × 74 × 42 inches (73.7 × 188 × 106.7 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Furniture
  
  
  Department
  American Art before 1950
  
  
  Credit
  Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  2000.86
  
  
  Copyright
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