Special holiday hours at the Stickley Museum means your gift shopping doesn’t have to be a chore. Visit the Museum Shop between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Friday, November 27 to discover wonderful gifts and escape the frenzy of the shopping mall. And get a free museum tree ornament for yourself with any purchase of $50 or more. Just take a quick turn off of Route 10, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by the natural beauty of Craftsman Farms, and while you’re here, join a tour and relax in the candlelit beauty of the Log House. Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends!

Special Holiday Hours is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

“For Gustav Stickley and other American Arts & Crafts designers the word ‘Mission’ contained a variety of meanings. Initially Stickley embraced the word and published articles promoting it along with calling his furniture ‘Mission Style.’ However in time he abandoned it, perhaps to distinguish himself from other furniture makers.”  So states, Dr. Richard Guy Wilson, who will be the featured speaker at the Stickley Museum’s 2nd Annual Amy Stahl Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 14.

Wilson also suggests that use of the term “‘Mission’ was an attempt to distinguish the American Arts & Crafts from English and European sources. Mission styled furniture, ironware, pottery and buildings became commonplace in the 1890s and 1900s throughout the United States as the Arts & Crafts took hold. The word also implied reform and fit in with the intent that product design and production along with much more political issues were part of the Arts & Crafts mission.”

Richard Guy Wilson holds the Commonwealth Professor’s Chair in Architectural History at the University of Virginia (Thomas Jefferson’s University) in Charlottesville, Virginia. His specialty is the architecture, design and art of the 18th to the 20th century both in America and abroad. He was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, England during the Winter-Spring 2007.  He received his undergraduate training at the University of Colorado and MA and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.

Wilson has received a number of academic honors, among them a Guggenheim fellow, prizes for distinguished writing, and in 1986 he was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He received the outstanding professor award at the University of Virginia in 2001. He has directed the Victorian Society’s Nineteenth Century Summer School since 1979. He has served as an advisor and commentator for a number of television programs on PBS and A&E, most significantly over sixty-five segments of America’s Castles.

A frequent lecturer for universities, museums and professional groups, he has also published widely with many articles and reviews to his credit. Wilson has been the curator and author for major museum exhibitions such as The American Renaissance, 1876-1917; The Art that is Life:  The Arts and Crafts Movement in America; The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941 and The Making of Virginia Architecture.

He is the author or joint author of 16 books that deal with American and modern architecture which include studies of McKim, Mead & White, Thomas Jefferson’s design of the University of Virginia, Monument Ave in Richmond, the AIA Gold Medal, a contribution to the recent book on RM Schindler (2001), and principle author and editor of the Society of Architectural Historians book, Buildings of Virginia: Tidewater and Piedmont (2002). His The Colonial Revival House was published in the fall of 2004 and Harbor Hill: Portrait of House was published in 2008.  Following the lecture Wilson will sign copies of this most recent book, which  explores Harbor Hill, a lavish mansion designed by Stanford White and built in the early 1900s on Long Island.

For tickets or to receive further information, please contact the museum at 973-540-0311 or education@stickleymuseum.org

To download the registration form, please click here.

Amy Stahl Lecture and Book Signing:
by Richard Guy Wilson
Sat., Nov. 14 at 4:00
$10 Members
$12 Non Members

What is Mission? Are you curious about this term in architecture and design? is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

We are pleased to announce a special opportunity for Stickley Museum members. Show your current Stickley Museum membership card for a $10 discount on  A Centennial Conversation: Art Pottery Discovery Day, a special educational program featuring David Rago, Suzanne Perrault and Decorative Arts Curator Ulysses Grant Dietz.  The event will take place at The Newark Museum on Saturday, November 21, 1 – 4:30 p.m.  Participants are invited to bring a piece of pottery to The Newark Museum for this Centennial Conversation, to share with the experts their stories of what their pots mean to them and to learn more about the pottery.  The program is being held in conjunction with the Newark Museum’s current exhibition, 100 Masterpieces of Art Pottery 1880-1930, which will be on view through January 10.  Pre-registration is required.  For more details call 973.596.6613.

Members of the Stickley Museum or The Newark Museum $25

Non-members $35

A Conversation on Art Pottery is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

Are you looking for a way to get involved with the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms? Have you thought about volunteering in our gift shop?

Shopkeeping is a fun and gratifying volunteer job and a great way to get involved at The Stickley Museum. Shopkeepers interact with visitors, handle transactions, help maintain inventory, provide customer service, and assist with general upkeep of the shop. Training is provided, and shopkeepers are encouraged to train at their own pace, shadowing practiced shopkeepers until they feel they are ready to be added to the schedule. If shopkeeping sounds like the job for you, call director of education, Vonda Givens at 973-540-0311. Shopkeepers are needed on weekends year-round and on weekdays April through November.

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Join us on November 8 at 4:00 for this outstanding lecture, reception and book signing!

Was Gustav Stickley a Modernist? New Perspectives on Early Masterworks

Presented by Joseph Cunningham, Ph.D.

Click Here to Register Today!

Was Gustav Stickley a Modernist? New Perspectives on Early Masterworks is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

This week’s highlighted piece is the triangular Stickley cabinet in corner of the dining room. Have you seen all our featured pieces?

Corner Cabinets

Dimensions: 50 3/4″ W x 66 1/2″ H x 26 1/2″ D
Oak with copper hardware
Date: Circa 1910 – 1911
Mark:
Designer: Unknown
Acquired by the Craftsman Farms Foundation at Christie’s, New York, November 29, 1999, lots #417 and #418.

As the manufacturer of reproduction “period” chairs through the 1880s and 1890s Stickley would have been well aware that the corner cabinet was a common vernacular furniture form in late 18th and early 19th century America. Given his professed admiration for the design skills and craftsmanship of the artisans of that pre-industrial era, it is not surprising that when his firm began producing case pieces that he would want to construct a Craftsman version of that familiar form. He first cataloged a Craftsman corner cabinet in 1902, making it of massive oak planks and giving it glazed doors with wooden mitered mullions above a pair of solid oak cupboard doors enriched with iron or copper strap hinges. About the same time his firm created a variant of that design with diamond-paned leaded glass doors instead of wooden mullions. This diamond pattern is familiar to any one who has ever visited Craftsman Farms and noted the many log house windows that use this same motif.

In 1903, Stickley made a corner cabinet for the Arts and Crafts exhibition he held that year in the Craftsman Building, offering it for sale for the high price of $100. That tall, strap-hinged oak case piece is the most magnificent corner cabinet ever produced by his firm. Fortunately – for later generations – it did not sell, and Stickley took it home to his own dining room. It remains in his family today and has been shown in several recent museum exhibitions. His firm evidently manufactured other corner cabinets in later years, but after 1902 none were included in Craftsman furniture catalogs. In April 1906, however, The Craftsman magazine offered plans and building instructions for a corner cupboard in its monthly feature, “Home Training in Cabinet Work.” The short accompanying text noted that making this case piece was a complicated task for a novice: “This piece is the most difficult of any yet given in our Cabinet Work series. The fitting of the 45-degree angles must be carefully done. The glass mullions … demand careful work.”

Except for their triangular plan, the corner cabinets made for the log house dining room at Craftsman Farms are closely related to the standard china cabinets and bookcases the firm was then manufacturing. The top rails curve gently from back to front, an elongated iteration of the curve frequently seen on Craftsman case pieces made between 1901 and 1916. The glazed doors have straightforward, lap-jointed mullions and, as was true of all cataloged Craftsman china cabinets from 1907 on, the interior shelves are stationary. For his own home Stickley might have specified china cabinets with costlier, more labor-intensive mitered mullions and adjustable shelves. But instead of insisting on those subtle refinements he followed the dictates of what had become his standard factory practice. If there is a slight indulgence evident here, it is the shapely, non-standard hammered copper hardware echoing the hardware on the sideboard.

In late 1916 Stickley’s firm made perhaps its final corner cabinet. Combining vernacular, Gothic Revival, and Sheraton attributes, it was part of his ill-fated Chromewald line, and was finished with hand-rubbed blue and brown hues. Though not particularly well constructed, and a far cry from his earlier Arts and Crafts furniture, it is a delicately beautiful object and a fitting conclusion to his nearly fifteen year engagement with this three-sided cabinet form.

The Collection: The Dining Room is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

A staged reading at the Grolier Club, New York

Wednesday, 19 November, 6 p.m.

The first American performance of Virginia Woolf’s comedy, Freshwater, will be held on Wednesday November 19th in New York’s Grolier Club. The play, a hilarious send-up of Woolf’s great-aunt, the famed photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and her friends poet Alfred Tennyson, painter G. F. Watts, and actress Ellen Terry, was written for a private Bloomsbury theatrical party in 1931. It is being presented in conjunction with the Grolier Club’s exhibition, This Perpetual Fight: Love and Loss in Virginia Woolf’s Intimate Circle (17 September–22 November 2008).

This staged reading is sponsored by the William Morris Society in the United States, the Grolier Club, American Friends of Arts and Crafts in Chipping Campden, the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms, and the Victorian Society in America.

Arthur Giron, the director, is a playwright and former head of the Graduate Playwriting Program at Carnegie Mellon University. A founding member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, the nation’s foremost play development organization, Giron had been called “One of our best contemporary dramatists” by critic Rosette La Mont. His latest play Emilie’s Voltaire won the Galileo Prize and will open in New York in 2009. The cast includes Liza Vann as Julia Margaret Cameron. A recipient of the Clarence Ross Fellowship from the American Theatre Wing, she has performed extensively in regional theatre. Her latest work is Good Ol’ Girls, which airs on PBS later this year.

Tickets: $12 reduced rate for members of the Stickley Museum and other sponsoring organizations, $18 for all others, may be purchased from the William Morris Society in the United States, either online at www.morrissociety.org.

Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. A reception will follow the performance.

For more information: (302) 831-3250.

Location: The Grolier Club is at 47 East 60th St., New York, www.grolierclub.org.

More information on this performance can be found on The William Morris Society’s blog.

Virginia Woolf's Freshwater is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

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.

The Collection: The Dining Room is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

We wanted to share this wonderful article about Charles Rohlfs in today’s New York Times.

Charles Rohlfs’s Theatrical Furniture to Go on the Road

For a few years around 1900 journalists made pilgrimages to a barely marked furniture workshop in an attic over a bicycle factory in Buffalo. The workshop’s owner, a charismatic former actor named Charles Rohlfs (1853-1936), feigned some modesty in his dusty garret. But then he convinced the visiting reporters that his “artistic furniture” had no precedents or peers, only imitators.

The writers gushed over his square-framed oak pieces with sinuous carvings. “Never have art and utility been joined more skillfully than in these chairs and tables and desks,” wrote one in The Buffalo Daily Courier. The German magazine Dekorative Kunst described Mr. Rohlfs as “inventive and uninfluenced,” and Furniture Journal declared him a main inspiration for the far more famous and prolific designer Gustav Stickley.

“Rohlfs was a truly great self-promoter,” said Joseph Cunningham, the author of “The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs” (due in October from Yale University Press) and the lead curator of a Rohlfs retrospective that begins a three-year tour next June at the Milwaukee Art Museum (with stops at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Dallas, Pittsburgh and San Marino, Calif.). Mr. Cunningham, the curator of the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation in Manhattan, which promotes scholarly research and owns some Rohlfs objects, has spent three years analyzing Rohlfs’s biography. Despite woodworking skills and charm, he stayed in business for less than a decade, producing perhaps a few hundred pieces.

To read the rest, it’s on page E23 for those of you in the New York area, and or you can read it online at Charles Rohlfs, Furniture Artisan, to Have a Touring Retrospective – NYTimes.com

For more information about Rohlfs’ work be sure to register to hear Dr. Cunningham speak at the Amy Stahl Memorial Lecture on November 8.

American Decorative Art In Today's New York Times is a post from The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms