Grille

Born and trained in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), Samuel Yellin became America's most important ironworker within a decade of his arrival in Philadelphia, around 1905. He worked with many of the most prominent architects of the day and a wide variety of clients, including wealthy businesspeople, public leaders and tastemakers, as well as banks, universities and churches. This decorative iron grille is a study made for Stan Hywet Hall, a grand, English-Tudor manor house built for Frank and Gertrude Seiberling in Akron, Ohio, between 1912 and 1915. Frank Seiberling was an early industrialist and co-founder of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The house became one of Yellin's most important early commissions, which allowed him to create a variety of architectural and decorative ironwork, modernizing medieval European designs for a new context. The vertical branching vines of the grille are an innovation on French design, a pattern which appears on Yellin's ironwork in other parts of the house. The grille features gently curving tendrils and leaves, delicate rosettes, and vertical rods terminating in dragon's-head finials and feet. The Huntington has two important pieces by Samuel Yellin in the collection: this decorative grille and an iron Inkwell (2008.24), from Yellin's personal collection.