Daniel Pabst - With Furness

With Furness

The most famous pieces attributed to Pabst are a Modern Gothic desk and chair made to the designs of Frank Furness. Created for the architect's brother Horace (and slightly altered from Frank's surviving drawings), they are now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Furness family correspondence documents an 1871 set of bookcases by the pair (one now at the University of Pennsylvania, others now in the Barrie & Deedee Wigmore collection, NYC), which are visible in a circa-1900 photograph of Horace Howard Furness's library.

In 1873 Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (father of the future president) hired Furness to decorate his newly-built townhouse at 6 West 57th Street, New York City (demolished). Based on designs in Furness's sketchbook, manufacture of the ornate paneling, bookcases, cabinetry and mantels is attributed to Pabst, along with individual furniture pieces. The massive dining table—with a base of carved egrets eating frogs—is in the collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. The cameo-carved master bedroom suite is at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, President Theodore Roosevelt's summer home in Oyster Bay, New York. Antiques expert/dealer Robert Edwards (who discovered the Pabst-attributed cabinets now at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) has identified a chair now in the Barrie & Deedee Wigmore collection as having come from the Roosevelt library.

An 8-foot (2.4 m)-tall Aesthetic Movement exhibition cabinet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is attributed to Furness and Pabst. It features cameo-carved doors in maple and walnut, painted glass panels backed with foil, a shingled-roof top, and ornate brass hardware. This tour de force, reminiscent of Furness's bank buildings of the late-1870s, may be the masterpiece of their collaboration.