Art: Iron Elegance

Last week Hobe Erwin, a Manhattan decorator, was fired by oil rationing and the trend of history to display his unique collection of 19th-Century coal and wood stoves (prices: $30 to $200). Manhattanites, sweltering all week long, did not buy a single stove, but Hobe Erwin, waiting almost as eagerly as the Russians for a frost, is sure they will. Meanwhile his stoves’ iron elegance appealed to amateurs of American art.

Type No. 1 in his collection is a Franklin stove. Type No. 2 is the same with a covered front (“The girls,” said Hobe, “got precious and wanted fancy doors on their stoves”). Type No. 3 is the box stove sometimes known as the “chunk,” forerunner of the kitchen range.

But it was on Type No. 4, the double-decker, that 19th-Century iron founders really went to town. After 1810, Classic Revivalists designed these things with pillars, cornices, lyre scrolls, fluting and acanthus leaves. About 1840, with the Victorian Age, gimcrackery went wild. Fancy stoves were designed like houses, with mansard roofs and movable iron puppets in the windows. There were also Chinese pagodas with swinging bells. In the most restrained taste was a job turned out by a Troy, N.Y. foundry (see cut), possessing a large humidifier urn on top, in which the housewife could put oil of cloves, cinnamon or verbena to scent the room, and a hot plate over the fire on which she could make tea.

Collector Erwin picked up his stoves during the past ten years, for the fun of it and for the occasional whimsical client who wanted a “Victorian room.” Erwin knows his Victorian interior. He has designed sets for a good many movies, including Little Women, noted for their period detail. But the principal charm he sees in his stoves is that they are functional; no matter how old they are, they can still heat a room.