Lockwood de Forest

Lockwood de Forest ( born June 23, 1850 in New York City, New York, † April 3, 1932 in Santa Barbara, California ) was an American interior decorator and painter and one of the representatives of the American Aesthetic Movement.

Life

De Forest came from a wealthy New York family, which owed ​​its wealth of waterways with South America and the Caribbean. He grew up in Manhattan in the town house of the family and in the summer at the country seat on Long Iceland with his three siblings. The art-loving parents convey that property to all children.

First Painters years

1868 de Forest visited Rome and was awarded with the Italian landscape painter Hermann David Salomon Corrodi lessons. Here he met his mother and his great-uncle, the painter Frederick Edwin Church, , with whom he made ​​a drawing and painting Italy tour. The uncle became his mentor and the two held their cooperation even after their return to the U.S. in 1869 upright.

De Forest hired in 1872 in the newly built house Tenth Street Studio Building in Manhattan Sudio a studio at. In the following years he learned in New York, the artist Sanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett, Jervis McEntee and Walter Palmer Launt know. His success as a painter was not very big. In 1872 he exhibited in Manhattan for the first time in the National Academy of Design. In 1875 and 1878 he made ​​two painting journeys to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Interior designer and contractor

In his mid- twenties de Forest was built in the Persian style country estate of his great- uncle's Church, Olana on the Hudson River north of New York, and its extensive library of the areas of interior architecture and design, architecture and familiar. His first project in these areas was the transformation of the parental town house in Greenwich Village in 1876.

De Forest in 1879 Partners, founded by the artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, Samuel Colman and Candace Wheeler firm Associated Artists in which he was responsible for the production of wood components for the interior. In the same year he married and made his wife a three-year " honeymoon " to India. The couple collected furniture, textiles and jewelery and founded in Ahmadabad in Gujarat in collaboration with the family of merchants Hutheesing the Ahmadabad Woodcarving Company. This company was important for the production of load-bearing, carved wooden furniture and parts for the American market in the coming years. The Associated Artists existed only four years but had a great influence on the aestheticism American expression through the emphasis of craft work and skills, the combination of colors with surface structures and the development of exotic but tasteful topics in the interior.

With the founding of his own design company by de Forest in 1892 in New York to set up a sales area was accompanied in Manhattan in the No. 9 East 17th Street. He was responsible for the designs, supervision of production in India and the import of manufactured parts, but also continued to make designs for interiors and supporting elements of the interior design. His works have been shown in London in 1886 on the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, as well as the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He became well known through these exhibitions and received orders, for example, by Andrew Carnegie to equip his library and his bedroom at his home in Manhattan, the Cooper Hewitt Museum now houses the. He received further orders by the transportation magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes, the Chicago businessman Potter Palmer or the author Mark Twain.

Later life and death

Around the turn of the century de Forest began to paint again, introduced from 1898 frequently in the Century Association and the National Academy of Design from. The demand for interior design in the style of aestheticism was made ​​, as new styles such as Art Nouveau was favored. He spent the winter from 1902 in his own home in Santa Barbara, California on the west coast of the United States. The mild climate and the shores of the Pacific took him prisoner. The years up to his death he spent with painting and traveling in the natural areas of the U.S., to Alaska and Mexico.

Exhibitions

Publications

• Indian Architecture and ornament. G. H. Polley & Co. Boston 1880.
• Illustrations of Design, based on notes of line as used by the Craftsmen of India. Gun & Company, Boston / New York 1912.