page_title: Bryn Mawr College Deanery
section_title: Lockwood de Forest
hierarchical_section_title: Bryn Mawr College Deanery / Decoration / Lockwood de Forest
caption_attribution_description: The Deanery, Interior View, Mamie Gwinn's "small study" is pictured with Lockwood de Forest stenciling on the ceiling and walls, Bryn Mawr College.
context_page_description: The Bryn Mawr College Deanery was the campus residence of the first Dean and second President of Bryn Mawr College, Martha Carey Thomas, who maintained a home there from 1885 to 1933. Under the direction of Thomas, the Deanery was greatly enlarged and lavishly decorated for entertaining the college's important guests, students, and alumnae, as well as Thomas’ own immediate family and friends.
  From its origins as a modest five room Victorian cottage, the Deanery grew into a sprawling forty-six room mansion which included design features from several notable 19th and 20th century artists. The interior was elaborately decorated with the assistance of the American artist Lockwood de Forest and Louis Comfort Tiffany, de Forest's partner in the design firm Tiffany & de Forest, supplied a number of light fixtures of Tiffany glass. De Forest's design of the Deanery's so-called 'Blue Room' is particularly important as it is often considered one of the best American examples of an Aesthetic Movement interior, alongside the Peacock Room by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
context_section_description: The design and decoration of many of the Deanery's interior spaces was entrusted, in large part, to the American artist Lockwood de Forest.  A student of the landscape painter Frederic Church, de Forest enjoyed moderate success as an artist, exhibiting his work at a variety of venues including the National Academy of Design in New York. De Forest made his living, however, as a designer and an importer of exotic goods.  In 1880, he and Louis Comfort Tiffany established the firm of Tiffany & de Forest, which focused largely on the importation of East Indian decorative arts.  By 1883, de Forest had set up his own import business, based in New York City, which distributed carved teakwood furniture, tracery panels, jewelry, and textiles, some of which were produced in his workshop in Ahmedabad, India. For the second and third renovations of the Deanery in 1894–1896 and 1908–1909, M. Carey Thomas consulted de Forest for the design and decoration of the Deanery's interior. De Forest's hand is clearly detectable through his incorporation of East Indian materials and designs, as well as Tiffany glass.
  The most perceptible element of de Forest's design aesthetic in the Deanery is his stenciling, a technique for which his Indian workshop was known. Geometric designs were stenciled on the walls or on the ceilings throughout the house, as, for example, on the ceiling of the Blue Room, as an upper border in the dining room, a mid-height border in the corridor between the studies, and as an upper border and on the ceiling in Mamie Gwinn's study. Even the floors of the dining room were stenciled, as Thomas noted in a letter to de Forest: "You remember it was so with my dining room. In four years the stenciling under the wax which we put on the floors was entirely worn off." Several pieces of furniture were also transformed into "art furniture" by the addition of stenciled designs, possibly as a cost-saving measure, as the 1894–1896 renovations cost over $14,000.
  In addition to the stenciling, de Forest's touch can be seen in the incorporation of other Eastern designs and Tiffany glass. De Forest used carved teakwood, like that produced by the Ahmedabad Woodcarving Company, in the molding along the outer edge of the fireplace in Mamie Gwinn's study, as well as some picture frames in the corridor between her and Thomas's study (the Blue Room). In the third expansion of the house in 1908, de Forest decorated the ceiling of the Dorothy Vernon Room with thin sheets of patterned brass in a variety of East Indian designs. Several of the rooms also included Tiffany glass lamps or fixtures that were designed by de Forest and created in the Tiffany Studios.
caption: Stenciling on the ceiling and walls of Mamie Gwinn's study by Lockwood de Forest
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