Author: John Bigelow Taylor, Jennifer Howe

Publisher/Date: Ohio Univ Press/ Cincinnati Art Museum, 2003, 1st paperback printing.

Format/Condition: NEW large softcover book is in fine condition. 295 pages, profusely illustrated in color. Measures 8 ½ x 11 inches

Description: In the early 1850s three British expatriates—Henry Lindley Fry, his son William Henry Fry, and Benn Pitman—settled in Cincinnati and launched one of the most important manifestations of the Aesthetic movement in the United States, the Cincinnati art-carved furniture movement. By the early 1870s the Frys began offering private instruction in woodcarving, and Pitman initiated classes at the School of Design (later the Art Academy of Cincinnati). The Frys and Pitman and their students—primarily affluent women seeking suitable artistic pastimes—gained wide acclaim for their woodcarving through their display at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. National art journals continued to feature Cincinnati woodcarving throughout the 1880s and to publish articles by Pitman, a prolific writer and philosopher of the movement.

Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors is the first book devoted to the study of this nationally significant artistic movement. Edited by Jennifer L. Howe, with contributions by noted scholars, this volume situates the movement within the context of the city’s rich cultural heritage, documents the careers of the Frys and Pitman in England and America, explores their domestic and ecclesiastical interior commissions, and examines the central role women played in this movement. Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture and Interiors catalogs the Cincinnati Art Museum’s impressive holdings of Cincinnati art-carved furniture and architectural elements and includes an appendix of biographical information on more than one thousand of the Frys’ and Pitman’s woodcarving students.