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PMH Collections Quarterly

                                                            Summer 2014


In This Issue
New Accession
Archives Feature
Collections Feature
Fenyes Feature
New Accession

Primary School Chair

PUSD Primary School Chair, circa 1920. Oak. Gift of Helen Smith in memory of Hugh Smith. Photo by Marlyn Woo

The small oak primary school chair on display in the Pasadena Unified School District section of the Crown City Jubilee
exhibit is an evocative demonstration of the influence of the national progressive education movement upon our local schools. Historically, school furniture was characterized by fixed or bench seating. The shift to small movable furniture in the early twentieth century was deliberate, and thought to allow new teaching opportunities in the classroom.[1]
  

 First grade classroom at Columbia School, circa 1910 (Main Photo Collection, S6-4)

  

First grade classroom at Longfellow Primary School, 1920. Photograph by H. A. Varble (Main Photo Collection, S11-B12)

  

Progressive educational reforms to classroom furnishings and spatial arrangements are dramatically illustrated in the above photos, taken a mere decade apart.  The first grade classroom at Columbia School, circa 1910, shows rows of fixed desks with attached seats. Ten years later, these furnishings were replaced by child-sized movable chairs and a flexible floor plan, as shown in this 1920 photo of Longfellow's first grade classroom.  



[1] Bollivant, Lucy, ed.

Kid Size: The Material World of Childhood. Milan, Italy: Skira, Vitra Design Museum, 1997.

  

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About the Collections

 

PMH maintains the area's largest and most comprehensive collection of documents and artifacts relating to the history of Pasadena and neighboring communities.  

 

The ever-expanding collection spans the years 1834 to the present and contains well over one million historic photographs, rare books, manuscripts, maps,  architectural records, art, costumes and textiles, and objects.  

 

The Mission of the Museum is to promote an appreciation of history, culture, arts, and sciences relevant to Pasadena and adjoining communities.    

The Collections Quarterly, sent out four times a year, features new acquisitions and loans as well as select items from the Archives, art and artifacts collection, and the Fenyes-Curtin-Paloheimo collections. 
Archives Feature

Chairs from Interior Decorators - Cheesewright Studios

     

The Archives houses the Cheesewright Studio's portfolios on furniture, wall papers, home accessories, and examples of decorated rooms and residences. Edgar Cheesewright was from England and worked for a well-known interior decorating company in New York in 1905. After moving to the Los Angeles area, he started his own interior decorating business in 1918. He had important clients from as far north as Washington state to as far east as St. Louis.  

 

Although he favored traditional style furniture for furnishing homes, he was not against modern decorating style and furniture. This is evident from the portfolios in the special collection that contains pictures of modern furniture such as the chairs seen here. John Bancroft, an employee of Cheesewright Studios, compiled these portfolios. Cheesewright wrote an article about his preferences and opinions on whether modern decorating styles would replace traditional styles in an article in the California Arts & Architecture issue of September 1938. 

 

If you would like to read this article or view the portfolios, please visit the Research Library & Archives. We are open from Thursday to Sunday,1:00 to 4:00 p.m. No appointment is necessary. 

 

 

Image: Chairs (Cheesewright Studios, Box 1, Portfolio)

 

Collections Feature

The Mystery of the Horn Chair             

 

Tucked away in a quiet corner in the attic of the Fenyes Mansion, the horn chair has long been an object of fascination for the Museum staff. Recent research in the Archives revealed some of its history, but left us with more of a mystery to uncover.

  

Horn furniture, thought to evoke the spirit of the pioneering west, enjoyed a period of popularity in the United States from the 1880s through the early decades of the twentieth century. Horns were fashioned into chairs, tables, and hat racks, as well as smaller accessories such as knife handles, canes, and buttons.

   

This horn chair was given to the Museum by Mrs. James Elms in 1958. James Elms grew up on a small ranch in Los Angeles and moved to Altadena in 1903. Soon after the donation of this horn chair was recorded in the curator's files, C.F. Shoop, a local history correspondent, published an article about it in the Pasadena Star-News (January 26, 1958). He claimed that the chair had been made for Don Juan Bandini by his ranch hands.

 

Is there any truth to this claim? The renowned Don Juan Bandini (1800-1859) was hugely influential in the development of Southern California. The fashion for horn furniture did not emerge until twenty years after his death, and although the chair is rustic in style, it was certainly constructed by a skilled furniture craftsman rather than a ranch hand. 

 

Many of Don Juan's children settled in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley. Arturo Bandini, the eighth son of Don Juan, had the strongest connection to Pasadena. His 1903 Greene & Greene-designed home evoked the spirit of the California ranchos. A longhorn steer chair would not have looked out of place in the Arturo Bandini home, although the chair does not appear in any of the known interior photos. For now, the mystery of the horn chair remains unsolved.

 

The horn chair is currently on display in Crown City Jubilee: Celebrating Significant Anniversaries in Pasadena.  

 

 

Image: Horn chair, circa 1880. Longhorn steer horns, leather, and linen (1958.001.01). Gift of Mrs. James Elms. Photo by Marlyn Woo
 
Fenyes Feature
 
The Girl, the Chair, and the Painting

 

The next time you visit the Fenyes Mansion, notice the Louis XV-style berg�re, or armchair, positioned near the piano in the drawing room. Now look across the room to the painting above the fireplace. Young Leonora, Eva Fenyes' granddaughter who was nicknamed Babsie, is sitting in the very same chair.  

 

Currently, the chair is covered in ivory damask. Its crest and seat rails, arms, and legs are applied with gold leaf. When artist Richard Miller used this chair as a prop, it was upholstered in the floral brocade seen in the painting. Not an artistic interpretation, the original fabric is verified in a photograph probably taken in Eva Fenyes' garden studio.  

 

Babsie strikes an unwilling pose for this photograph and looks a bit sullen. A note on the back verifies her mood, "L.F.C. very cross being painted by Richard Miller, Pasadena." Miller, who occupied the studio for nine months in 1916-17, noticeably softened Babsie's expression and backdropped her portrait with an Impressionistic Pasadena landscape.

 

 

 

Images, top to bottom: Miller, Richard E. (1875-1943). Pensive Portrait,1916-17. Oil on canvas, 36 x 34 in. (2000.019.0098); Chair, Louis XV-style giltwood berg�re, circa 1910 (PMH 2000.019.4055); Photograph, Leonora Frances Curtin posing for painting by Richard Miller, 1916-17. (FCP.102.4)