A handful of nice mold maker in china photos I located:
Benn & Adelaide Pitman Bedstead
Image by elycefeliz
www.discoveringthestory.com/goldenage/bed/background.asp
This mahogany bedstead was created by Benn Pitman on the occasion of his marriage to his second wife, Adelaide Nourse. Adelaide carved the decorative motifs on the bed, which was made for the Pitman house on Columbia Parkway. The interior of the home was decorated with carved floral and geometrical motifs based on native plant life. Every thing in the property was carved by hand, from the baseboards to ceiling moldings and all its furnishings.
The bedstead is Contemporary Gothic in style and is composed of a headboard, footboard, and two side rails. The headboard is divided into 3 sections: two lancet panels with egg molding and a central trilobate arch. The central panel is carved with a flock of swallows flying in the evening sky. The birds are depicted in different stages of relief, some practically 4 and a half inches from the headboard. Others are shown in low relief to suggest a sense of depth. Just below and to the correct of the birds is a crescent moon in low relief. Hydrangea blossoms in high relief are carved into the lower section of this panel. In the reduced left is a carved inscription that reads, "Good evening, good rest." Extending above this is an arched hood that is carved with 4 panels of overlapping daises. The 4 finials of the headboard are carved in the shape of wild parsnip leaves.
In the two lancet panels on either side are painted photos of human heads on gold discs representing evening and morning. These panels have been painted by Elizabeth Nourse (1859-1938), Adelaide’s twin sister, who was an internationally acclaimed painter. To the left is Morning, surrounded by painted white azaleas. To the appropriate is Night, surrounded by balloon vines. The corners of these side panels are carved with stylized leaves and berries.
This bed, which occupied the Pitman’s bedroom, was meant to symbolize and celebrate sleep. Quickly soon after its completion, it received significantly acclaim and was exhibited in 1883 by the Pitmans at the Fifteenth Annual Exhibition of the Work of the School of Style of the University of Cincinnati and also at the Cincinnati Industrial Exhibition. In 1909 the bedstead and the rest of the bedroom were described in the Cincinnati Industrial Gazette: "It is such a space in which a sufferer of insomnia would totter drowsily upon entering. The entire combination is created to symbolize "night" and so faithfully is repose portrayed that sleep practically overcomes one particular inside the door. The bed is a masterstroke of human genius…and the whole combination appears covered with such a constant nocturnal veil as to make the words "good night" at the bottom very unnecessary."
72.249.182.183/collection/search.do?id=15453&db=objec…
Artist/Maker Benn Pitman (American, b.1822, d.1910)
Elizabeth Nourse (American, b.1859, d.1938)
Adelaide Nourse Pitman (American, b.1859, d.1893)
Date 1882-1883
Medium American black walnut and painted panels
Credit Line Gift of Mary Jane Hamilton in memory of her mother Mary Luella Hamilton, produced feasible through Rita S. Hudepohl, Guardian
Benn Pitman, an expatriated Englishman, arrived in Cincinnati from Philadelphia in 1853. Although educated to be an architect, he traveled to America to promote the phonetic shorthand technique developed by his brother Sir Isaac Pitman. Sometime among his arrival and 1872, he created an extraordinary interest and talent in woodcarving. Pitman embraced the Aesthetic Movement and turned to nature for inspiration.
In 1872, carved furnishings, doors and baseboards created by the Pitman loved ones, which includes his wife, Jane, and daughter Agnes, were exhibited at the Third Cincinnati Industrial Exposition.
He taught woodcarving at the College of Design of the University of Cincinnati (later the Art Academy) from 1873 to 1892. He also invented an electrochemical approach for relief engraving (1855), was court recorder for the Lincoln assassination trial (1865) and wrote a biography of his brother (1902).
Adelaide Nourse Pitman, the twin sister of Elizabeth Nourse and youngest of ten youngsters, was born on October 26, 1859, in the Cincinnati suburb of Mt. Wholesome. Her parents had moved to Cincinnati from Massachusetts in the early 1830s. Her father, a banker, suffered critical economic losses following the Civil War. As a result of this loss, the girls were needed to assistance themselves. The twins enrolled in the University of Cincinnati College of Style, which charged only minimal tuition. Whilst at the University, Adelaide joined Marie Egger’s china painting class and began a number of years’ study of wood carving beneath Benn Pitman. She worked on the carving of the Cincinnati Music Hall organ screen, carved a quantity of architectural elements for the interior of the Ursuline chapel in St. Martin, and received a silver medal at the 1880 Cincinnati Industrial Exposition.
On August 10, 1882, Adelaide married Pitman in Sandusky, Ohio. She was twenty-two and he was sixty. Following their marriage, she continued to operate, beneath his supervision, in copper, silver, and brass, as nicely as on decorative wood carvings for the Pitman property on Columbia Parkway.
In 1883 she gave birth to her 1st youngster, who died in infancy. The couple’s second youngster, born July 5, 1884, was named Emerson. The third and final child born to the couple was their daughter, Melrose, born on November five, 1889.
Tragically, Adelaide Pitman died on September 12, 1893 of tuberculosis. She was only thirty-3 years old.
Elizabeth Nourse was a painter, sculptor, wood-carver, etcher, illustrator and decorative artist who accomplished her greatest success following 1887 as an expatriate in Paris. Born a twin in Mount Healthier, she enrolled in 1874 at the Cincinnati University College of Design and style, graduating in 1881. She had planned to continue her research in New York, but with the death of her father and the marriage of her sister, Adelaide, to furniture-maker Benn Pitman her plans changed.
Nourse studied for a couple of months at the National Academy of Style and from 1883-86 worked as a portrait painter spending component of every single summer time sketching and painting in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. It was the nearby individuals who would turn into her subjects. In 1887 she exhibited 4 watercolors at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition and quickly soon after she and her older sister, Louise, left for what was to be a go to to France. They spent the rest of their lives abroad.