HERTER BROTHERS (1864-1906)
Dressing Table with Mirror
circa 1880
commissioned for the Darius Ogden Mills Residence, 'Happy House,' Millbrae, California, ebonized wood, marquetry, marble, and glass, stamped 'HERTER BROS' twice on the back
height 85 1/4in (216cm); width 77 3/4in (197.5cm); depth 24 3/4in (63cm)
Footnotes:
Provenance
Darius Ogden Mills (1825-1910), Millbrae, California
Thence by descent
'The Contents of Happy House', Butterfield & Butterfield, Millbrae, 3 November 1953
'Fine European and American Furniture', Bonhams & Butterfields, San Francisco, 26 February 2007, lot 1042
'Important 20th Century Design', Sotheby's, New York, 12 June 2009, lot 65
Private Collection, San Francisco

Literature
'Artistic Houses', New York, 1883-1884, vol. 1, part 2, n.p. (for a period photograph of a nearly identical model in the bedroom of William H. Vanderbilt, 640 Fifth Avenue, New York)
Doreen Bolger Burke, 'In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement', New York, 1986, p. 168
Katherine S. Howe, 'Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age', New York, 1994, p. 76 and pp. 195-199 (variant ebonized works illustrated)
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, 'Christian Herter's decoration of the William H. Vanderbilt house in New York City', The Magazine Antiques, March 1995, p. 415

Darius Ogden Mills was born in 1825 to a wealthy and long-established Salem, New York family. After the discovery of gold in California in the late 1840s, Mills ventured West and arrived in Sacramento in 1849. During the 1850s, he succeeded in amassing a fortune through interests in railroads, investments and mining. In 1860 Mills purchased 500 acres of the Rancho Buri Buri near San Francisco and named the property Millbrae. On the estate he built an Italianate Second Empire mansion, known as 'Happy House', designed by the firm of Diaper & Seltzer and completed in 1871. The Herter Brothers firm was responsible for the first interior decoration scheme of Happy House, in the Renaissance Revival style, as well as the second iteration, a redesign in the fashionable aesthetic taste installed around 1880. The new furniture Herter supplied included two ebonized and inlaid bedroom suites in the Anglo-Japanese style, one of which was for Mrs Mills' bedroom that is likely to have incorporated the present lot.

Another, almost identical dressing table and mirror was supplied by Herter for the bedroom of William H. Vanderbilt, in his mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue, New York circa 1882, and is illustrated in Artistic Houses. The lush and dense floral marquetry, typical of Herter's Anglo-Japanese-style production of the mid 1870s and early 1880s, is also closely related to a bedstead from an ebonized suite executed for Arabella Worsham Huntington that is currently in the collection of The St. Louis Museum of Art (accession no. 183: 1977.1).
This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: W
W If the lot is not picked up immediately following the auction it may be removed to an offsite storage location for collection. Please contact the salesroom location for further details including dates of removal and applicable charges.