Important ironwork by Samuel Yellin is rarely found extant in original architectural settings, but these andirons were discovered in the very fireplace in Mr. Downs’s office for which they were made nearly 100 years ago. Preserved and protected by subsequent owners of the “Castle” headquarters of Westinghouse Air Brake, these are the first works offered to the public from this important Pittsburgh-area commission.

Samuel Yellin was born in Mogilev-Podolsky in Ukraine in the Russian Empire in 1884. Following the death of his father in the late nineteenth century, his family fled anti-Semitism and resettled in Philadelphia between about 1900 and 1905.

In the first years Yellin lived in Philadelphia, he quickly became a renowned teacher at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and built his business, particularly with early private clients from J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. to Otto Kahn and important public commissions from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to the Wadsworth Atheneum. By the mid-1920s, Yellin’s genius as a designer and craftsman were well known, and his extraordinary creations were commissioned by clients virtually across the country.

Because of the incredible wealth and sophisticated taste present in Pittsburgh in the early twentieth-century, Yellin’s work for this industrial center was unusually fine. Often more adventuresome and refined than works made for conservative Philadelphia clients, Yellin’s work for his Pittsburgh clients in the 1920s rivals his designs for the homes of plutocrats in New York City and on Long Island.

Yellin’s first work in Pittsburgh was for one of his four early and important ecclesiastical commissions from Gothic Revival master Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. The First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh received among the best of this ironwork, establishing Yellin’s presence—just up the hill from the University of Pittsburgh—in Steel Town, USA. Commissions for Pittsburgh residents Emil Winter (1919), James S. Hammond (1921), and Benjamin Franklin Jones Jr. (1923) led to the flurry of masterworks in 1924 and 1925 for the residences of Lee L. Chandler and George Matheson Jr. and for La Tourelle, the home of Edgar J. Kaufmann, who later commissioned Fallingwater. Often working with Pittsburgh’s finest architect, Benno Janssen, Yellin found a perfect set of clients in Pittsburgh with whom to experiment widely and reach a remarkable level of achievement. Janssen and Yellin would enjoy a terrific collaboration and friendship through to the last year of Yellin’s life, when he made a complex lantern sconce for the architect’s own residence.

Founded by George Westinghouse, the inventor of the air brake and a pioneer of electrical engineering, the Westinghouse Airbrake Company had erected a five-story sandstone headquarters, by architect Frederick J. Osterling, in Wilmerding, a small town to the southeast of Pittsburgh, in the 1890s. Janssen & Cocken were the architects of an executive wing—with offices, conference rooms and dining rooms— in the French Renaissance style that was added in 1927. Yellin’s commission for the project included hardware, lighting and andirons, at a total price of $6,447.

Yellin’s hardware and lighting for the commission was generally restrained, but the fireplace equipment was exceptional. For the andirons for the executive office of Mr. Downs, Yellin boldly experimented with inventive forms, construction and ornamentation. Arising from dramatic scrolled cabriole legs, the andirons offered here are supported from the back by billet bars that narrow at the intersection of the legs, joining tongue-in-groove to the front legs below and the stile above, with feathered ribbon terminal. The decorated rectangular collar above foils the curvilinear legs and feathered ribbon and leads upward to the faceted, bulging and tapering central stile. Notched decorations on the legs pair with the feathered tongues. Angular notching and feather motifs repeat on the stile and front arms, while starburst or snowflake decorations on the collars vary the ornamental patterns between the lower and upper portions of the andirons. The vertically-oriented scrolls at the base contrast with the flattened and carefully tapered scrolled terminals of the front arms, which serve as ornaments and, together, as a holder for a fire fork or shovel. In a further exhibition of craftsmanship, the upper stiles boldly swell and taper, rising to the necks of the charming and novel animal heads, which hold thick, flattened and heavily decorated rings in their jaws.

Representative of the incredible achievements of Samuel Yellin Metalworkers for Pittsburgh clients in the 1920s, the present lot offers an opportunity to acquire a truly inspired design that unites much of the best of Yellin’s style and technique in a work that stands on its own, defying categorization within any specific art-historic t.mes or place.