The Devil with a Hammer in His Hand

 

QUESTION: I’ve always been fascinated with decorative ironwork. Seeing it on my first trip to New Orleans got me hooked. Ever since, I’ve sought out decorative gates, window grills, and railings. Most of this ironwork is unsigned, thus the creators remain anonymous. Recently, I heard of a especially talented metalworker named Samuel Yellin. What can you tell me about this artful metalworker?

ANSWER: Few people think of hand-wrought iron as being an art form, but metalworker Samuel Yellin produced an incredible amount of forged ironwork he designed and executed along with talented craftsmen trained by him. His designs followed the concepts of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the first quarter of the 20th century. Although he was knowledgeable about traditional craftsmanship and design, he championed creativity and the development of new designs for both intimate or monumental scale, for private homes or large institutions. .

Born in Russia in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1884, he apprenticed to a master ironsmith at age 11.  In 1900, at the age of 16, he completed his apprenticeship. Shortly afterwards he left the Ukraine and traveled through Europe before emigrating to America in 1900. He headed to Philadelphia where his mother and two sisters were already living. Yellin took classes at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and within several months began teaching a class in wrought iron work, a position he maintained until 1919. 

He opened his first shop in 1909 with three assistants. Through recommendations by architects with whom he worked, Yellin built an appreciative clientele. He soon received the first of many major commissions, the palatial gates of J.P. Morgan's Long Island estate. To keep up with burgeoning business, the firm of Mellor & Meigs Architects, for whom Yellin had designed and created many commissions, designed a new studio for him on Arch Street in Philadelphia in 1915.

As a material, iron lacks intrinsic value and has little aesthetic appeal. The color is coarse, and it’s often used for the most utilitarian items.. Yellin's ironwork is endowed with a great deal of character and appeal based largely on the visual evidence of its having been crafted by hand. 

Yellin believed there was only one way to make good decorative metalwork and that was with the hammer at the anvil. He was adamant about working from traditional designs. He saw the poetry and rhythm in iron.

He also believed his ironworks should harmonize with their environment. Iron window grilles naturally restrict access and provide security, but Yellin insisted that ironwork must not be seen as a barrier. Ironwork should instead create a visual bridge between people and buildings, and to the space beyond it.

Yellin's gates, railings, lanterns, doors, grilles and numerous other creations not only adorned and decorated the buildings and rooms for which they were created, but also are among the finest in artistic achievement in ironwork.

His decorative ironwork is reminiscent of that in the Middle Ages. Yellin preferred to be called a blacksmith, not an artist or metalworker. He believed a metalworker needed to be both designer and smith, for every hammer stroke became an integral part of the design. His railings were tactile as well as visually appealing. He turned,, twisted, and pulled the iron, demonstrating the physical process involved in manipulating the challenging material. Tenons were important in Yellin's work. He used them to show how he joined the pieces together. These were part of the design, providing texture and dimension to the tops of the handrails or edges of the gates. 

Forging is the process of shaping metals by hammering or pressing them after making them pliant by the application of heat. Forging improves the structure of the metal by refining the grain size thus making it stronger, more ductile, and more resistant to fatigue and impact. Hand-forged iron reached its peak during the 13th and 14th centuries in Italy where ironworkers used it in many chapel screens and window and door grills. 

French and Spanish artisans were responsible for much of the early ironwork in New Orleans, while early ironwork in the northeast U.S. is due to English and American metalworkers: By the Industrial Revolution, cast ironwork replaced hand wrought iron.

From 1921 to 1924, Yellin worked on what was probably the largest commission of wrought iron work: 200 tons of wrought iron for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. This massive project required expansion of the shop to 60 forges and 250 workers.

At the firm's peak in 1928, Yellin employed 268 men. The studio received over 1,200 commissions in the 1930s alone. 

Although a heart attack in 1930 slowed his pace and he concentrated on experimental techniques. He died suddenly in 1940 at the age of 55. 

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Hold That Door

QUESTION: My mother collected doorstops. She had a collection of about 50 which she left to me when she died. I know very little about them, but I’d like to continue collecting them. What can you tell me about them—how did they originate and when, and how collectable are they today?

ANSWER: It’s great that you plan on continuing your mother’s collection. Most people seem to want to get rid of whatever items they inherit while others just warehouse them. But curating and growing a collection is different. Now it’s up to you to figure out just what doorstops you have, selling those that aren’t very good and adding those that will enhance your collection. But first, you need to learn a bit about their history.

Doorstops date back to the last quarter of the 18th century, around the time of the American Revolution, but in England. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes and held open large doors. The British called them “door porters” and liked the cast in iron or bronze.

By the early 1800s, doorstops began appearing in a variety of materials, including wood, glass, and earthenware. The cast-iron doorstops had flat backs from the hollow molds used to make them, allowing them to stand flat against the surface of the doors.

By the middle of the 19th century and especially following the Civil War, doorstops had evolved into full three-dimensional figures and were becoming increasingly popular in the United States.

American manufacturers followed the basic English tradition of making cast-iron doorstops in the familiar shape of baskets and flowers. They also began to develop a variety of attractive shapes, including houses, ships, stagecoaches, and all kinds of wild and domestic animals. American makers hand painted them in bright colors until all sorts of colorful doorstops were readily available.

By the 1880s, it wasn’t unusual to find iron birds, story book characters, and even a few human-type figures propping doors where ventilation was seasonally so important in so much of the country.

Some believe the Amish developed the use of the human figure as a doorstop to its fullest form starting in the 1880s and continuing into the 1930s. They cast figures of men, women and children, painted them with pleasing facial features, and dressed them in time-honored Amish clothing. These seven to nine inch high doorstops today sell for a minimum of several hundred dollars each.

Casting techniques had improved enough prior to the turn of the 20th century to enable foundries in the U.S. to manufacture nearly every design of doorstop a home owner could want. In fact, some of the firms invited customers to send detailed sketches of doorstops, so that they could create them. But all this variety of design resulted in variations in both the size and weight of doorstops. Heights ranged from four or five inches to two feet.

One of the most popular forms of doorstops was the dog. Manufacturers produced doorstops in the shapes of just about every breed of dog, from Alaskan Malamutes to Russian Wolfhounds to a variety of terriers. Many of these animals were full figure, cast in two parts, screwed together, and painted.

The Albany Foundry Company of Albany, New York, and A.M. Greenblatt Studios of Boston, Massachusetts, were among the major manufacturers of doorstops in the early 20th century. Both did a booming business in the late 1920s, selling cast-iron doorstops  for about a dollar each.

Additional firms included Hubley Manufacturing Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which made toys, Littco Products, National Foundry, and Eastern Specialty Manufacturing Company.

Doorstops were still quite effective and desirable well into the 1930s. Generally, production ceased abruptly at the onset of World War II, since factories converted to production of war materiel.

Today, antique doorstops sell for $50 or so in good condition, but can go as high as $200 for some special ones.

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