It’s Tuesday again, and time to take a look at another piece in our collection! This carpet happens to be one of my favorites but don’t forget about all our other featured pieces.
Donegal carpet 
Dimensions: 165″ x 114″
Wool
Date: Ca 1905 – 1910
Unsigned
Designer: Attributed to Morton’s Studio
Anonymous gift to The Craftsman Farms Foundation.
Stickley evidently first made personal contact with the British carpet manufacturing firm, Alexander Morton & Company, when he was in London on a buying trip in January 1903. The subdued colors of these lush woolen carpets – chiefly greens, yellows, and blues – as well as their stylized floral and plant-form motifs certainly appealed to Stickley’s Arts and Crafts taste. The distinctive designs were created by Alexander Morton’s son James and nephew Gavin, as well as a distinguished roster of British freelancers, among them C. F. A. Voysey, the Silver Studio, Lindsay Butterfield, M. H. Baillie Scott, and numerous others. The carpets were hand-woven for Morton in Ireland.
In March and April 1903, Stickley showed two Donegal carpets at his Arts and Crafts exhibition in Syracuse and Rochester, New York, offering one for sale for $190. During the exhibition, Stickley’s firm announced that it was now importing these carpets, and it continued to do so throughout the following decade. Stickley illustrated a Donegal carpet in his first textile and needlework catalog (March 1905), offering a light weight rug at $12.50 a yard and a heavy weight rug for $16.50. These were costly carpets: a multi-hued Craftsman drugget rug pictured in that same catalog was priced at $2.50 a yard. Promotional copy in the 1912 Craftsman furnishings catalog reveals that the firm did not keep Donegals on hand: “The Donegal rugs which are made for us in Ireland are not carried in stock, but woven to order…. From four to six months are usually required to fill an order for Donegal rugs.” The catalog copy also makes clear the Donegal’s appeal: “These rugs … come in designs with broad effects and well-blended coloring that bring them into complete harmony with Craftsman … furnishings.”
By the time this 1912 catalog was published Stickley had already furnished the dining room at Craftsman Farms with two Donegal carpets and a Donegal runner, and one carpet remains in that space. The two carpets seem to be in the pattern Morton called “The Fintona,” a stylized plant-form design attributed to the Silver Studios. The carpets’ predominantly green, yellow, gold, and dusty rose tones complemented the green-brown woodwork and furniture and picked up the colors of the amber glass light fixtures, the window curtains and other Craftsman textiles used in this room. Stickley’s catalogs promised that Donegal carpets would be in “complete harmony” with Craftsman furnishing, and in the dining room at Craftsman Farms he made that promise a reality.
In November of 2006 rug maker Del Martin donated three exact reproduction carpets, after exhaustive research on the original carpet, and these rugs are now on display in the Log House. The original rug will be displayed when the museum is able to construct appropriate space in the future.
While the original carpet is in the Craftsman Farms collection, it’s too fragile to be displayed out on the floor, so the carpet we see in the Log House is a gorgeous reproduction.
