SIGSTEDT STUDIO

DESIGN AND MANUFACTURE OF STAINED GLASS AND PAINTED MURALS

April 4, 2003

Dorothy Berndt
Archivist
St. Marks Lutheran Church 

Dear Ms. Berndt,

It is interesting to hear from a client regarding work done long ago. I am pleased to be asked about the particulars of the commission done for St. Mark’s Lutheran Church and I will try to recall some of them for your archives.

First let me congratulate the church on doing this. I can assure you that most organizations are not so scrupulous about the many small events that ultimately make the presence in a building: the original objects created by artisans who for the most part expect to remain anonymous. Most of the people who make beautiful things for a living consider themselves like the carpenters and masons who also focus considerable knowledge and ethics on their work, and seldom sign their names. It is a pleasure to be noticed.

I grew up in the home and studio of my artist parents, and my earliest memories are of my father’s studio in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, where I learned to carve wood and early in my life decided to be a woodcarver like my father. He called me his apprentice, and when I grew old enough we worked bench-to-bench. He saw to it that I was equipped just like him, with the same number of carving tools (about 250), identical benches and beautiful French wooden vises that he brought back from Paris where he honed his woodcarving skills in the pursuit of French carved rococo furniture. In the early part of the last century he and his brother designed and made fine rococo furniture in great variety and to extremely high standards, in their prominent Stockholm store.

My father won a national contest for a commission for the King and Queen of Sweden: to detail and carve the ornate rococo decorations for ‘The Vasaorden,’ a large ceremonial boat used to welcome royalty to the port of Stockholm. This was his masterwork, a term of honor almost forgotten today. Thorsten came to America in 1927 with my mother Cyriel Sigstedt, a research scholar and archivist specializing in the study of Swedenborgiana. They settled in Topton/Allentown, PA where he began carving ecclesiastic statuary for the De Long Furniture Company, eventually graduating to his own studio in Bryn Athyn, where he arrived at a sweeping original art style that culminated in large statues of Christ, mostly for Lutheran churches (Gloria Deo, in Bethayres, PA, for example) culminating in the woodcarved decor for the courtrooms at the Dauphin County Courthouse in Harrisburg, PA.

At the time I designed and carved your organ screen icons my father was around seventy years old, and was generously sharing his commissions with me. I was by then a professional woodcarver, and I had done a replica of the richly woodcarved Robert Morris Mantle in the first executive mansion of the United States in what is presently the Pennsylvania Historical Society’s principal location; the mantle was done for the Smithsonian Institution’s First Ladies’ Wing, the Jane Adams tableau, commissioned through the John Grass Woodturning Company.

The Church and my father gave me full freedom to select the themes and to design the panels, which were presented as cartoons to the Pastor and presumably the Building Committee for their approval. The actual carving took around seven months, as I recall, for the sum of $3,000.00; the figure stayed in my mind because I gave the check to a couple named Humphries in full payment for the Old River Hill Schoolhouse in Point Pleasant, still the place where I live and work. If you happen to keep your old cancelled checks my or my father’s names will appear, plus the Humphries’ signature as they counter signed a two-party check at settlement.

I remember how proud I was to have done a large well-received reredos, as a young idealistic artist-craftsman. Somewhere in my welter of photographs (that I call my midden) I must still have some photographs of the panels before they were installed.

I remember long conversations from about ten years ago with the then-Pastor, whose name I have mislaid, but I recall him as a powerful sensitive man who said he was trying to develop as much of the factual details of his building as soon as possible since he was not expected to live very much longer. In his records he might have a letter from me about the work. He told me the church building had won awards, which of course was of great interest to me.

I am presently a well-perceived stained glass artist. My studio, located in the same place since 1961, has done large commissions for hospitals, churches, residences and restaurants, also original woodcarvings. I designed and made two cherry doors for a private residence in Summit NJ; each door has a landscape stained glass window, and rich original carvings on every inch of surface, and if the term still has meaning, that would be my masterpiece. All the time I carved the doors I had the enormous pleasure of my late father’s presence.

I hope this long letter is no a great deal more than you wanted to know about me and my father, but let me say it was delightful to be thinking about all this material again.

Sincere Regards, 

Val Sigstedt