Woodworker's Journal 2004 Spring, страница 5

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Museum of Art. Purchased with the Director's Discretionary Fund, 1971.

Exhibition Society. 'The aim," as Hobby Horse magazine stated in 1884, "is to render all branches of Art the sphere, no longer of the tradesman, but of the artist."

England's Arts & Crafts artists supported each other with publications, a network of guilds,

Photo courtesy Craftsman Auctions Lambertville/ David Rago and Jerry Cohen

This Gustav Stickley drop-leaf table employs cathedral shaped cut-outs as a decorative element

and even a number of communal societies. Later, when the movement reached American shores in the 1890s, all these aspects went with it.

The Mission Style

Among those preaching the Arts & Crafts gospel of good design in the U.S.A. were the Mission furniture makers. That's not the name the designers would have chosen, but it caught on after New York salesman J.P. McHugh used it

to sell a line of furniture patterned after a California chair. McHugh encouraged stories that the original chair had come from an old Spanish mission.

Despite disliking the name, the American designers did view themselves as missionaries of a sort. Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft crafters' community, asked people to call him "Fra Elbertus" and published An American Bible to dispense his brand of practical wisdom. Gustav Stickley, the best-known Mission designer, used his Craftsman magazine as a pulpit.

Influenced by an 1898 trip to Morris's England, Stickley wrote, "We must support an art created by the people for the people ... an art wherein the designer and the craftsman shall be one and the same individual, creating for his own pleasure and unassailed by commercialism."

The Mission furniture designs themselves incorporated morals: some of Stickley's heavier pieces, for instance, symbolized stability. If you couldn't budge the sideboard, the logic went, you would have a strong marriage. The lack of excessive

ornaments and the exposed construction details, like tenons,

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dovetails and butterfly joints, were supposed to make the furniture more "honest." Straight lines and solid vertical and horizontal members were also characteristic of the style.

When selecting materials to express this style, Mission designers often looked to Mother Nature. Stickley noted that oak, the style's wood of choice, adapted well to Mission's simplicity — and that the simplicity showed off the natural character of the tree. Other Mission crafts also emphasized the

The Morris chair was named for Arts & Crafts guru William Morris, although it was his friend Philip Webb who actually created them. Gustav Stickley made this example of the large armchair with adjustable back and removable cushions.

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Spring 2004 Arts & Crafts Furniture