Metal Bracket Design 1850 - 1900

This small pencil drawing shows a design for a metal bracket on a brick wall. While we don’t know when it was made, the design of the bracket, with its stylized leaves and flowing lines, looks back to earlier styles, perhaps even medieval ironwork. It is the kind of historicizing design that became popular in the 19th century, as industrialization encouraged a nostalgic interest in pre-industrial craft. So, what do we make of this drawing? Was it produced by an individual artist? Was it intended to be a proposal for a real bracket, or was it purely speculative? The fact that the drawing ended up in the Metropolitan Museum, a place dedicated to the art of the past, suggests that someone, somewhere, thought it had artistic merit in itself. However, in order to fully understand what this bracket meant, it would be worth digging into archives on both sides of the Atlantic for records of similar designs, construction firms that made them, and institutions which used this kind of architectural detail. Only then we will understand its original social context.