The Nearly Lost Art of Iron

For centuries wrought iron was everywhere in Europe, forged by hand into hanging signs, church lecterns, locks, kitchenware, and architectural features. Then in the 19th century, it started to disappear. Materials like steel and glass became more fashionable, while radical urban renewal projects leveled old structures. Their ironwork ornamentation was often melted down for reuse, or thrown in the trash. Jean-Louis-Henri Le Secq Destournelles, a painter and photographer, noticed the vanishing of this artistic heritage in Paris. Between 1853 and 1870, many of its historic streets were destroyed under the plan of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, replacing them with broad avenues lined with uniform architecture.

Le Secq salvaged ironwork from these Parisian ruins, and from those scraps his collection grew. Now the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen is among the world’s leading museums of antique ironwork. “This material used to be ubiquitous, but it seems to have fallen out of our visual vocabulary, even though wrought iron still appears in many places, from balcony railings on old buildings to ornaments in old cemeteries,” said Kathleen M. Morris, the Sylvia and Leonard Marx director of collections and exhibitions and curator of decorative arts at the Clark Art Institute.

The Art of Iron at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts displayed thirty-six objects from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in 2018. The two museums are part of the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME), which supports partnerships between institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. "It's only the second time that a major exhibition of the treasures at the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles has been organized abroad," said Alexandra Bosc, curator of decorative arts at the Rouen museum. The Art of Iron follows the 2015-16 Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

The pieces at the Clark ranged from menacingly spiked 18th-century dog collars to a 17th-century snake-shaped water spout. “I tried to select objects of great quality, as well as diversity, both of which are indications of the character of the holdings of that museum,” said Morris. Whether a blooming metal rose on an 18th-century florist’s sign, or an inventive 1823 safe door outfitted with an alarm pistol that fired when the lock was tampered with, they reflect how ironsmiths worked hot metal for a diversity of purposes. Architectural grilles, like an elegant 1700 circular example from Amiens that may reference the rose windows of the city’s cathedral, demonstrate wrought iron’s use in allowing air and light circulation in buildings before glass windows. A hefty 17th-century cooking pot on an hook, elegantly tooled with patterns, recalls the material’s role in the home when most meals were made over open fires.

“Some of the forms are instantly recognizable in terms of function, such as a wrought-iron gate,” Morris stated. “Others are more mysterious, such as a bear muzzle, or a 17th-century depiction of a tree in wrought iron. I love that they all tell a story—some of them more apparent than others.” The signs in particular were made to pictorially communicate an establishment’s purpose, essential before widespread literacy and the 18th-century introduction of address numbers. For instance, a cabaret’s bat-shaped sign told passersby that this was a place to enter after dark.

Before he was a champion of iron, Le Secq was a middle-class Parisian who studied sculpture and painting. Then his curiosity was piqued by the newly invented photography. In 1851, he was hired to photograph historic monuments in the north and east of France, where he encountered the Gothic cathedrals of Reims and Strasbourg. “It’s probably then that he became fascinated by ironwork ornamentation, particularly present in the churches,” Bosq explained. That attraction developed into an obsession, as he rescued iron ornamentation from ruined buildings in Paris. "The whole 19th century was a period when the know-how in wrought iron was gradually lost—it was replaced by the semi-industrial technique of cast iron, producing objects through sand casting techniques—and so it's certainly also by nostalgia for a disappearing craft that he became passionate about this technique,” Bosq said.

Le Secq was not alone in noticing this fading heritage. One of the signs in The Art of Iron is for a Paris wineshop called “À l’Homme Armé,” and features a man in armor sitting on a cannon, enjoying a glass, bordered on two sides by grape vines. The shop was photographed by Eugène Atget, who documented streets and storefronts before their demolition during the Haussmann years with a similar attention to old world details. The connection between the sign and photograph is especially valuable as Le Secq rarely recorded the exact provenance of the ironwork.

When Le Secq died in 1882, his younger son Henri Le Secq des Tournelles (who added a space in their last name) took up the iron mantle. He was exceptionally keen on amassing encyclopedic series. In the exhibition catalogue, Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau, curator of public sculpture for the City of Paris, relates how Henri searched for “an entire set of surgical instruments” and that “his collection of women’s chatelaines, totaling 226 objects, was the most important of its kind ever assembled.” He was an eccentric presence in the flea markets and secondhand stories, dressed, as he was described in a 1956 article, “in his signature grease-stained black morning coat, its buttons coming loose, topped off by a grimy hat and always carrying a ratty old bag in which he crammed his finds; he looked more like a homeless tramp than a rich collector of antiquities.”

Styled as he was in Dickensian squalor, the young Le Secq was as studious with his acquisitions as his father. He loaned more than 1,000 iron objects to the 1900 Exposition Universelle, where they were so popular that the collection remained in Paris for twenty years as part of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Then Le Secq approached the city of Rouen with an offer to donate the collection in its entirety, and in 1921 it was opened as a museum in the former church of Saint-Laurent.

As Le Secq, who was the museum’s curator until his death in 1925, jubilantly wrote: “It’s all done! The collection belongs to the city of Rouen, for Rouen to preserve, select, keep a vigilant watch over, and give immortal youth to … and thus it will not perish! More fortunate than some of its sister collections, it will not be broken up by the fiery blast of an auction.”

The now over 16,000 ironwork objects in the Rouen museum are still installed in the old Gothic church. At the Clark, the examples were shown in the Tadao Ando-designed Michael Conforti Pavilion, contrasting the hand-forged material to the modern lines and glass walls of the luminous space. Although The Art of Iron offered a small sample of the objects in Rouen, it encapsulated the now obscure craftsmanship of iron, and the passionate collecting that preserved its history.