Cottier & Co. on Fifth Avenue, NY: A One-Stop Shop for the House Beautiful

An online lecture sponsored by the Victorian Society New York.
Recorded February 10th, 2021.
Speaker: Prof. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

Trained as a stained glass artist, the Glasgow native Daniel Cottier (1838-1891), by age thirty-five, had created a worldwide network of large shops where one could buy everything for the elegant home–. from furniture to fabrics; from chandeliers to fine china, and from paintings to stained glass panels. This talk will focus on Cottier & Co. in New York, its clientele, and the unique place it occupied among other interior decorating firms because of its inclusion of an art gallery, which promoted contemporary European art. Cottier’s close friendships with contemporary American artists, such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, J. Alden Weir, and the sculptor Olin Levy Warner, whose careers he supported without, however, selling their art, will also be discussed.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is professor emeritus of art history and museum studies at Seton Hall University (South Orange, NJ). A specialist in nineteenth-century art history, she has published or co-published some fifteen books, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues, in addition to numerous articles and book chapters. Her textbook, Nineteenth-Century European Art, is used across the world. She is the founding co-editor of the open-access journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (http://19thc-artworldwide.org). Most recently, together with Max Donnelly, Andrew Montana, and Suzanne Veldink, she has authored a book on Daniel Cottier entitled Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator, Dealer, which will be published in May/June by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and distributed by Yale University Press.