Lockwood de Forest

Lockwood de Forest
Lockwood de Forest wearing a Greek costume, circa 1870
Born	June 8, 1850 New York City
Died	April 3, 1932 Santa Barbara
Nationality	American
Education	Hermann David Salomon Corrodi
Known for	Painter, designer, decorator
Movement	Orientalist

Lockwood de Forest (June 8, 1850 – April 3, 1932) was an American painter, interior designer and furniture designer. A key figure in the Aesthetic Movement, he introduced the East Indian craft revival to Gilded Age America.

As a young man, de Forest first worked as a painter, taking the lessons of his Hudson River School contemporaries. In 1879, de Forest began his career in the decorative arts working at Associated Artists along with Louis Comfort Tiffany, before starting his own decorating business that he ran for thirty years. Upon his retirement, de Forest moved to Santa Barbara where he returned to his love of painting while still taking design commissions from local patrons.

Lockwood de Forest was born in New York City in 1850 to a prominent family that had made its money in South American and Caribbean shipping. He grew up in Greenwich Village and on Long Island at the family summer estate. Encouraged by his parents, Henry Grant de Forest and Julia Mary Weeks, Lockwood and his three siblings developed lifelong interests in the arts; the eldest son, Robert Weeks (1848–1931), served for seventeen years as the president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; their sister, Julia Brasher (1853–1910), wrote a book on the history of art; and their youngest brother, Henry Wheeler (1855–1938), was an avid art collector and amateur landscape architect.

During a visit to Rome in 1868, nineteen-year-old de Forest first began to study art seriously, taking painting lessons from the Italian landscapist Hermann David Salomon Corrodi (1844–1905). On the same trip, Lockwood met the American painter (and his maternal great-uncle by marriage) Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) who became his mentor. De Forest accompanied Church on sketching trips around Italy and continued this practice when they both returned to America in 1869. In 1872, de Forest took a studio at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. During these formative years, de Forest counted among his friends artists such as Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80), John Frederick Kensett (1816–72), Jervis McEntee (1828–91), and Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932).