Cooper Hewitt says...
Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932) was the protégé of the celebrated nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederic E. Church. Church trained de Forest in landscape painting during the early 1870s and engendered in his pupil a passion for exotic places and exotic decorative arts objects. This interest led de Forest first to the Holy Land and Egypt and finally to India, in 1881, where he went on his honeymoon for over a year to study and look for objects to import to the United States. An introduction to Muggunbhai Hutheesing, a Jain merchant whose family had recently commissioned an elaborate carved temple in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India, and still employed many of the most skilled craftsmen, led to the de Forest studio being set up in Ahmedabad. Its purpose was to produce hand-carved, by Mistri craftsmen, Indian teak panels and furniture, along with decorative brasswork which de Forest imported to the United States for use in interior decorating projects. Using these imported materials and other objects that he collected on his travels, de Forest provided decorative arts objects for interiors either in collaboration with or for Louis Comfort Tiffany with whom he had a brief partnership (1880-82). Working independently, de Forest designed interiors for his siblings Robert and Henry de Forest, Frederic E. Church, Mary Garrett in Baltimore and with M. Cary Thomas at Bryn Mawr College; George Wroth Knapp (Baltimore); and William Henry Appleton (Wave Hill), Andrew Carnegie, among others.
