About this artwork
Celebrated as the “poet of architects and architect of all the arts,” Edward William Godwin was a man of many accomplishments. In a career that spanned more than thirty-five years, he was an architect of civic, domestic, and ecclesiastical buildings; an innovative interior decorator and designer of furniture, textiles, and theater sets; and an articulate critic of art and architecture. Godwin first designed his ebonized sideboard, of which this is a variant model, for his own dining room in 1867, and he subsequently reconsidered the form over the next two decades. In its appearance, the sideboard represents a turning away from the weight of contemporary Gothic Revival aesthetics and a move toward a reductionist sensibility expressed through the balance of solids and voids. This spare style gained Godwin some notable contemporary clients, among them James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. In his 1904 study The English House, the influential German critic Hermann Muthesius wrote that Godwin’s furniture, including this sideboard, foreshadowed the more modern look that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. While calling Godwin’s creations “wildly picturesque,” Muthesius concluded that the overall effect was “one of elegance.”
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Status
- On View, Gallery 246
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Department
- Applied Arts of Europe
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Artist
- Edward William Godwin (Designer)
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Title
- Sideboard
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Place
- England (Object made in)
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Date
- Made 1871–1881
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Medium
- Ebonized mahogany with glass and silvered brass
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Dimensions
- 181.6 × 255.3 × 50.2 cm (71 1/2 × 100 1/2 × 19 3/4 in.) (with leaves e×tended)
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Credit Line
- Robert Allerton, Harry and Maribel G. Blum, Mary and Leigh Block, Mary Waller Langhorne, Mrs. Siegfried G. Schmidt, Tillie C. Cohn, Richard T. Crane, Jr. Memorial, Eugene A. Davidson, Harriott A. Fox, Florence L. Notter, Kay and Frederick Krehbiel endowment funds; European Decorative Arts Purchase Fund;Irving and June Seaman Endowment Fund; through prior acquisition of the Reid Martin Estate
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Reference Number
- 2005.529
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IIIF Manifest
- https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/186047/manifest.json
Extended information about this artwork
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