With their knack for reading the cultural zeitgeist, Kimbel and Cabus had the savvy to adapt designs to suit different tastes and pocketbooks. An extraordinary photographic record in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum became an invaluable touchstone for Veith and her colleagues in their tireless efforts to fulfil the legacy of the late Brooklyn Museum curator Barry R. Harwood, whose lifetime of research into Kimbel and Cabus underpins this exhibition. Photographs of stockbroker John Bond Trevor’s country house in Yonkers, and a drawing of Kimbel and Cabus’s display at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, illustrate how these pieces might have looked in a period domestic setting.  

Arranged against the bare white walls of the museum their inventiveness is writ large. As Veith notes, “Taken out of context, these pieces speak to people in a different way. To experience them in person is quite extraordinary.” Indeed, the longer you look, the more your gaze uncovers details such as inlaid Minton tiles, glinting strap hinges, and Christopher Dresser–style grotesques which both intrigue and delight. The more monumental designs for étagères and drop-front desks emit a certain Carrollian charm, while features like the angled hind legs of their Edwin Oppler–inspired chairs serve to suggest a latent energy within—“like a cricket ready to leap,” Veith says.