By Jeff Hunter ’96
Photos by Levi Sim

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Situated on the third floor of a building constructed during the Great Depression, it certainly wouldn’t come as a shock if one encountered something of a vintage nature in the Tanner Room. But behind the wooden door and frosted windows of the otherwise nondescript chamber in the Family Life Building is housed a unique collection of hand-carved furniture that dates back nearly as far as Utah State University itself.

And while the agrarian theme presented in the wood of the large oak table, marble-topped server, massive sideboard and 18 distinctive chairs certainly fits the motif of an institution founded in 1888 under the moniker of Agricultural College of Utah, the exquisite pieces actually hail from France, created between 1894 and ’96 from timber salvaged from the old Sorbonne University in Paris.

“I think this is one of those really hidden jewel boxes, because people walk by with no knowledge of what’s in here,” says Darrin Brooks, a longtime professor in USU’s Interior Architecture and Design program.

The suite came to USU via Anthony’s Antique Center in Salt Lake City and revered Utah philanthropist Carolyn Tanner Irish. Antique dealer Tony Christensen discovered the piece in Lyon, France, shipped it back to the Beehive State in 1997, and then, according to Brooks, he contacted Irish, who was serving as the chair of the board of the O.C. Tanner Company.

“After Tony found it, he had Carolyn Tanner Irish come into his shop, and he said, ‘This is something special. You have to see it. This just can’t go anywhere,’” Brooks says. “And she said, ‘Utah State is a land-grant institution. It needs to go to Utah State. And so, then it made its way here.’”

Believed to be crafted by Estevan Jarnach and Claude Delin, the suite celebrates French agriculture in the 1800s, the intricate carvings of the 9-foot-tall, 10-foot-wide sideboard depicting scenes of men and women laboring in the fields of Western Europe. Topped with the heads of peasant farmers, the 18 nonidentical chairs represent the 18 administrative regions of France, and the skirts of each piece display the primary agricultural product of a separate province, including grapes, onions and carrots.

Brooks, who has taught a graduate class centered around the dining suite, oversaw the re-upholstering of the chairs shortly about 20 years ago, but otherwise, the 130-year-old furniture remains much as it was when it was donated to Utah State through the Tanner Charitable Trust in 2004.

Regularly used for meetings, student scrutiny and social gatherings by the Interior Architecture and Design program, the set is like a huge painting, where new details like the turtles that serve as the front feet for the server or the oxen hooves that hold up the base of the sideboard are just waiting to be discovered.

In fact, the French suite is so alluring that in a Salt Lake Tribune article from 1998, Christensen declared, “This is easily the most important piece I’ve ever had.”

“It’s art,” the longtime antiquities dealer added. “To me, no one has to tell me what a piece of art means or what it is saying. It can communicate on its own with the human soul.”