A Well-Furnished World

Thomas Alexander Tefft's world began in 1826 in Richmond, Rhode Island, a rural village not unlike those depicted in many of the paintings that hang in this gallery. There, while teaching school, he encountered educational reformer Henry Barnard, who urged him to leave Richmond for Providence to work in the architectural firm of Tallman & Bucklin. In Providence, Tefft soon established himself with powerful manufacturers and industrialists, designing homes, churches, mills and schools commissioned by those men who constituted Rhode Island's upper class.

His background as a teacher, his association with Barnard and his Brown University education (class of 1851) undoubtedly contributed to his enthusiasm for books. In addition to joining in the Providence Athenaeum, Tefft assembled an extensive library of his own, including all the major American, English, French, and Classical authors, travel and geographical guides and volumes on many other subjects. We have exhibited just a few of the one hundred fifty architectural books he possessed at the time of his premature death at age 33 in Florence, Italy in 1859. His interest extended to his profession: Tefft designed the octagonal library (Lawrence Hall, 1846) at Williams College and proposed a design for the library of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester (1852).

Thomas Tefft played an active role in a world that was fascinated with the past even as it thrived on industrial progress. Holding membership in the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Newport Historical Society, the Rhode Island Art Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Franklin Lyceum, and the Franklin Society, Tefft was a true Renaissance man. He was one of the earliest advocates of art education and delivered many addresses on the subject. In his 1853 report on Fine Arts, delivered to the Rhode Island Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry, he urged that:

... every city should have its permanent museum of art. This should consist of a few excellent works in every department of painting, sculpture, and the useful arts. For instance, there should be portraits, landscapes, ideal compositions, historical pictures, (especially of local interest), casts of the celebrated antiques, and of the best modern works in sculpture; prints and drawings of the best of examples in civil, sacred, and domestic architecture; specimens of stucco ornaments; wood carving; the principal articles of furniture, including carpets, upholstery, mirror frames, paper hangings, specimens of designs for prints and the richer textile fabrics; examples of book illustrations and eery kind of engraving; fine specimens of silver work and jewelry; designs or models of stoves, mantels and gas fixtures, and all other articles which are influenced in their value or beauty by the application of artistic skill.

The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design is the legacy of Thomas Tefft's advanced thinking. "A Well-Furnished World: Rhode Island in the Age of Thomas Tefft, 1830-1860" reflects his ideas by including examples of the works of art that Tefft believed to be the essential components of museums.

The gallery looking out onto the garden is designed as a nineteenth century exhibition hall, in the spirit of those exhibitions held on the upper floors of Union Depot and in Howard Hall, two buildings designed by Tefft in 1847, when he was twenty-one.

The gallery to your left is organized on the theme of the nineteenth century home and includes architectural drawings by Tefft and his contemporaries for Rhode Island residences that are, in some cases, extant.

A concurrent exhibition, "Thomas Alexander Tefft: American Architecture in Transition, 1845-1860" is on view in the Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University through March 6.