Duncan Phyfe Furniture Part 1

ANYONE who is fortunate enough to own some old piece of Duncan Phyfe furniture will be sure to tell you at once that it has more real personality than any other furniture he owns. There is a certain delicate elegance in the swing and flare of such pieces of “gentleman mahogany” which allows them to grace the finest room, and also enables them to refine many a room furnished in mahogany types too ponderously massive to be smartly up-to-date. Place a Duncan Phyfe sofa and turn-top table in a living room furnished in the too heavy American Empire style, and see how the effect is lightened and made smarter at once. Furnish an entire room as nearly as possible in Duncan Phyfe pieces, and see if you and your home will not rejoice in as classical an American loveliness as that to be found on the first floor of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. For this floor of the wing owes much of its charm to its happy use of old Duncan Phyfe originals.

The pale sepia tones of the landscape set used for the walls cause the mahogany furniture to appear to fine advantage.

But whether your specimens of the Duncan Phyfe style chance to be treasured old family pieces, or whether they are merely the result of the modern reproducer who is inspired by old Duncan Phyfe designs, such furniture owes its chief distinction to its many unusual characteristics and details. There are the peculiarly lovely reverse-curve legs, which provide perhaps the most noticeable earmark of the style. There are the daintily carved lyre motifs found so often in the under-construction of the tables, or used as the decorative motif in the formation of chair backs. There are the trefoiled drop leaves of slender tables, which may be seen at their best silhouetted against some fair pale wall; there are the graceful Directoire curves of the sofas of the period, contrasted with the equally graceful high-shouldered Sheraton tendencies found in some of the other pieces illustrative of this style. And the details, which add an especial richness of whimsical surprise and delightful originality to the entire Duncan Phyfe period, are supremely individual in their quaint use of lion’s feet and eagle’s wings, trumpets, thunderbolts and ears of wheat, brass toes and lion-head handles, star and eagle hardware, and old-fashioned underbags on sewing tables!

All in all, we find the Duncan Phyfe style the quaintest sort of an admixture of charmingly unrelated contradictions, of tendencies which are at once Sheraton, Hepplewhite and Directoire; English and French; but the result, in its final analysis, is American! For the Duncan Phyfe style is one we can call truly our own, and it is just as much at home in our houses today as are we Americans ourselves.

For the most celebrated cabinetmaker this land has ever produced was Duncan Phyfe, who, though he was born in Scotland in 1768, came to this country with his parents at sixteen years of age, and settled with them in Albany, New York. Somewhat later, in Albany, Duncan Phyfe gained the reputation of being a very fine cabinetmaker indeed, but it was not until he removed to New York City that he achieved a more or less national fame, which increased as time went on, until he was considered the leading furniture maker and designer in the country. The period from about 1795 to 1825 may be considered the highest peak of his career, and the designs he made were so exceedingly fine that we delight in their reproductions today, and include them, as a sort of grand finale, in our Early American styles of the third, and last, sub-period division.

Part 1 of a 1927 magazine article on Duncan Phyfe Furniture

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 4:09 am and is filed under Furniture, Interior Decoration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.

One Response to “Duncan Phyfe Furniture Part 1”

A Coffee and a Cigar » Blog Archive » Quick scan of the net - furniture reproducer Says:
May 16th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
[...] http://1920-30.com/blog/duncan-phyfe-furniture-part-1/But whether your specimens of the Duncan Phyfe style chance to be treasured old family pieces, or whether they are merely the result of the modern reproducer who is inspired by old Duncan Phyfe designs, such furniture owes its chief … [...]