Instrument of torture
—Baltimore Newspaper, 1850s
This towering Gothic Revival hall stand—with its pointed arches, clustered columns, and carved crockets—was inspired by the designs of medieval cathedrals. By the 1840s, a growing number of influential designers promoted the high aesthetic and moral values of Gothic design. A home filled with furnishings in this style was thought to reflect the owner’s upstanding personal principles and piety. For other critics, however, the updated Gothic seemed like overkill for furniture. They ridiculed the purely decorative use of flying buttresses and clustered columns, originally designed to hold up vaulted ceilings of heavy stone. Similarly, intricate tracery or fretwork had been developed for sacred stained-glass windows, not for secular entrance halls. One Baltimore critic went so far as to call Gothic-style furniture “instruments of torture.”