Construction is indubitably the first and most important element in articles of furniture…There is no doubt that until recently construction was terribly degraded…with their bent and contorted outlines, their unmeaning angles and flourishes, their clumsy, superfluous legs, and ornaments of shapes impossible to describe. Be it noted—for this is the main point of my argument—that these perfunctory elaborations of structure were not beautiful in any sense. They were “false” and detestable, not by being unnecessary only, but by being hideous and inappropriate and mechanical. They were perfunctory…not spontaneous…They were produced simply by a resolve at all events to avoid plainness.
—Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, 1880
By the 1850s, most furniture in America was made in factories instead of small shops. This expanding industry helped consumers furnish their homes stylishly. A few decades later, however, upper-class tastemakers concluded that machines made bad furniture. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer was a fashionable New Yorker who wrote articles about art, architecture, and gardening for prominent magazines. She criticized industrially produced furniture like the sofa seen here because it flaunted unnecessary and “hideous” ornament. It also concealed its construction, which she found “false and detestable.” This sofa was made in a New York factory operated by John Henry Belter, a German immigrant who patented a wood-steaming process that layered thin rosewood veneers on top of one another to produce elaborate three-dimensional floral patterns. This machine-aided system allowed Belter to efficiently create furniture that revived the appearance of eighteenth-century Rococo-style hand carving. In the 1880s, Mrs. Van Rensselaer and her fellow art critics began to shift fashionable taste away from the types of elaborate decoration seen on this sofa toward straightforward production techniques and simple ornament. Furniture design, they argued, should be based on carefully defined principles of art and beauty taught in urban art schools.