Flowering Plant in Vase Design

Lockwood de Forest was an American artist who became infatuated with South Asian design following a trip to India in 1879-1881 on behalf of the Associated Artists, a cooperative interior decorating firm of New York run by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman, and de Forest. In Gujarat, India, De Forest set up the Ahmedabad Woodcarving Workshop, which produced furniture and architectural design elements and exported them to the United States where de Forest used them in interior design schemes. In 1882, he opened a design business and showroom in New York City that specialized in East Indian craft revival. This brass panel is characteristic of the metalwork and wood carvings that the Workshop produced and that de Forest displayed and sold in his showroom. Panels like this one were mounted on walls, turned into screens, and used as furniture inserts. De Forest’s promotion of East Indian design in interior decoration in America associates him with the Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century and the taste for the exotic in American culture.