I wanted to weigh in again, even though this is an antique post. The current controversy over the Jelliff/Schrenkeisen attribution is still there, because of publications by at least two museums. I want to make it clear, as I did when I wrote in Antiques some years back, that I feel I am right and my much admired and revered colleagues are, well, wrong. There are, to my knowledge, TWO known signed and dated pieces from Jelliff's factory. Both of these are early-ish. Newark Museum owns a dated 1855 Renaissance/Rococo bedroom dresser, and there was a gothic revival bookcase that came up a dozen years ago that was dated, as I recall, in the 1860s. Both of these pieces seem to have been dated by a workman, and the signature was an accident, rather than part of some routine of documentation.
As I've also always felt, once Jelliff ceased being a Newark-only cabinetmaker (i.e. once the transcontinental railroad system became really viable, after the Civil War), he became one of a number of "New York" furniture makers whose work was sold across the country. He would have wholesaled through New York furniture brokers--who had better access to cross-country shipping. The absence of catalogues and other documents in no way undermines the evidence built up in Newark over the past 75 years...
