Texas Furniture, Volume Two

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas furniture and its makers. After more than a decade of investigation, they published Texas Furniture in 1975, and it quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject. An updated edition, Texas Furniture, Volume One, was issued in the spring of 2012.

Texas Furniture, Volume Two presents over 150 additional pieces of furniture that were not included in Volume One, each superbly photographed in color and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. Taylor and Warren have also written a new introduction for this volume, in which they amplify the story of early Texas furniture. In particular, they compare and contrast the two important traditions of cabinetmaking in Texas, Anglo-American and German, and identify previously unknown artisans. The authors also discuss nineteenth-century Texans’ desire for refinement and gentility in furniture, non-commercial furniture making, and marquetry work. And they pay tribute to the twentieth-century collectors who first recognized the value of locally made Texas furniture and worked to preserve it. A checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, which contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, completes the volume.

Lonn Taylor is an authority on the architecture, furniture, and decorative arts of the American Southwest. He had a twenty-year career at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and also served as Director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Winedale Historical Center.

David B. Warren is an expert on American decorative arts and Founding Director Emeritus of Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, the former home of Miss Ima Hogg and now a museum of American decorative arts and paintings owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.