Sofa 1850 - 1860

This sofa was made by John Henry Belter, probably in New York, in the mid-19th century. Belter was a virtuoso of laminated rosewood, stacked in thin layers and then pressed into complex, curving forms. Notice how the wood has been worked almost to the point of lace-like delicacy, a style that was fashionable at the time. But Belter was also an innovator, holding patents on the machinery and methods that made this kind of mass-produced carving possible. His workshop would have been a noisy place, full of steam-powered saws and presses, with immigrant laborers doing much of the detailed work. This wasn't a traditional craft, exactly, but something new: a hybrid of hand skill and industrial technique. Belter’s achievement reminds us that the categories of art and craft have often obscured more than they reveal. They don’t tell us much about how things were actually made, or the social dynamics that gave rise to them.