Art Institute of Chicago

Sideboard

Designed by Edward William Godwin (English, 1833-1886)

Date

Designed 1867, made c. 1876

Medium

Ebonized mahogany with glass and silvered brass

Culture

England

Department

Applied Arts of Europe

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

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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