Bedstead from the Henry Gurdon Marquand House, New York City

This piece is part of a bedroom suite made for Elizabeth Love Marquand, the daughter of Henry Gurdon Marquand, second president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (see 1986.47.2-.3). The suite was used in her family's residence at Madison Avenue and Sixty-Eighth Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) and built between 1881 and 1884. When, in 1884, Elizabeth married Harold Godwin (grandson of the poet and editor William Cullen Bryant), she brought the bedroom suite with her to "Cedarmere," Godwin's family home on Long Island, where it remained until 1984. Although the suite was made of American woods, probably in New York, the delicate and highly skilled carving of the Renaissance-style motifs suggests the work of a foreign-born craftsman. In contrast to the taste for flat surface decoration that dominated the 1870s, richly carved furniture such as this became fashionable about 1880.