When Did the Arts and Crafts American Movement Begin
The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL Club QUARTERLY
Summer 1990, Volume 36, Numbers ii & iii
Introduction | Chronology | Arts & Crafts | The Marstons | Hebbard & Gill
Marston House | Walking Tour | Marston Garden
past Mary Dutton Boehm
Photographs from this article
The American Arts and Crafts movement was in its heyday from 1900 to 1916 and sought to reform gild through blueprint. From architecture and article of furniture, to metalwork, pottery, and textiles, the movement had answers for all the necessities of everyday life. People were improved by living in surroundings stripped of Victorian clutter and dishonest "revival styles" such equally Elizabethan, Gothic, Rococo, Neo-Grec, and Pompeiian. Information technology drew inspiration from both the English Arts and Crafts movement and the earlier Aesthetic movement.
The British design reform movement was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830's, the offset use of the steam engine to run tools fabricated possible the industry of more appurtenances. Pattern critics, notwithstanding, felt that the use of mechanism non simply contributed to bad blueprint merely also diminished the worker'south satisfaction in his job.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 fabricated the British aware of the design deficiencies of their articles. Several critics proposed solutions to these problems. A.West.N. Pugin drew upon Gothic sources to better Victorian design; he believed "in that location should exist no features about a building which are non necessary for convenience, structure, or holding [and] . . . all ornamentation should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the edifice."1 American craft designers copied Pugin'south involvement in honest construction.
The art critic John Ruskin decried the use of machinery in manufacturing. He wrote that, "all cast and car work is bad; as work. . it is quack." The designs had to be "honest" and truthful to the material used. Ruskin reacted negatively to "naturalistic" high Victorian blueprint where a silver tabular array centerpiece might be a camel or a palm tree at an oasis. Blueprint reform had moral overtones, for the worker who labored to industry an object would become a better man if his work gave him pleasure.ii
William Morris, the well-known English author, attempted to reform society through adroitness. In 1861, in league with several artists, he founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co., which created furniture, metalwork, printed chintzes, embroidery, wallpaper, stained glass, and painted tiles. After 1875, when the firm was reorganized as Morris and Co., information technology began to produce tapestry and carpets. Past the 1880'southward, Morris began to realize the essential paradox of the English language craft movement. While the furniture pattern was intended to provide moral uplift for all classes, only the rich could beget the labor intensive hand-painted furniture his business firm made. Disillusioned, Morris retired from the furniture business and worked to encourage the spread of Socialism.three
Other organizations besides promoted the Craft Movement. For example, the Art Workers' Order, an organization of architects, painters, and designers, was founded in London in 1884. The first official use of "the term "Craft" came when the Craft Exhibition Society displayed over 500 objects at an 1888 display. The Boston Gild of Arts and crafts, founded in 1897, was the first of several American organizations that promoted the arts and crafts credo.4
The Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876, fabricated Americans aware of their shortcomings in design manufacture. One remedy was to make craft more than universal by encouraging amateurs to create crafts. In Cincinnati, for example, socially prominent women such equally Mary Louise McLaughlin engaged in overglaze ornamentation of ceramic pieces at the Cincinnati School of Art. Some of these works were sent to the Centennial Exposition. At the Exposition, the women saw Oriental pottery and French barbotine ware ornamented with an underglaze decoration made from colored slips.five
Past 1879, McLaughlin started the Women'due south Pottery Guild. Maria Longworth Nichols, girl of a prominent Cincinnati family, did not receive an invitation to join the organization, even so. Piqued at the supposed snub, she formed Rockwood Pottery in 1880 which proved to be a neat success. The post-obit year, Nichols hired Clara Chipman Newton to serve as administrator and Albert R. Valentien as the first professional person decorator.vi In 1889, Mrs. Nichols turned over the pottery to William Taylor, the man who had previously managed the firm. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Rockwood standardized a smooth, highgloss, brown-gold glaze over even color transitions. Past the early twentieth century, the Rookwood factory followed the new trend of mat glazes created by William H. Grueby for his pottery.seven
Women also played a major role in another arts and crafts venture: Newcomb Higher pottery. This business firm started in 1895 at Newcomb College, the sis schoolhouse to Tulane University in New Orleans. Unlike the upper class women of Cincinnati, Newcomb women became interested in the decorative arts because it provided a source of income in a world where their options were limited."8
One characteristic of the Arts and Crafts period was the movement of craftsmen between firms. For example, Albert Valentien, the first professional designer for Rockwood, showtime visited San Diego in 1903, when he pursued his interest in painting wildflowers. Albert and his wife Anna, who had also worked for Rockwood for over twenty years, left the company in 1905. They sold their home in Cincinnati and moved to San Diego because Albert Valentien said, "Nosotros could think of nothing just California and its vast corporeality of Wild Flowers and lovely climate."9 That year, Albert Valentien was pleased when Ellen Browning Scripps unexpectedly commissioned him to paint the wildflowers of California with the intention of publishing the prepare when completed. Scripps eventually decided against publishing his works, challenge that information technology would be too expensive to exercise so. He and his wife did not totally abandon the ceramic field, however, establishing the Valentien pottery in 1911. The pottery was funded by banker Joseph W. Sefton Jr., who was on the committee for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. The life span of the Valentien pottery was curt because the neighbors objected to the smoke from the kiln and information technology closed in 1913. Sefton might have conceived of the Valentien pottery as a source of tiles for the exposition buildings; however, the firm was too small to produce the tiles rapidly enough. Another business firm, California China Products Visitor of National City executed the tiles for the California Building in Balboa Park and the interior of the Santa Fe Railroad depot. The output of the factory was not limited to tiles; it included utilitarian goods such every bit loftier voltage insulators, as well as porcelain tableware, "Belleek Artware", and Rockingham Ware.eleven
The Craft motility was non limited to ceramics. American manufacturers began creating arts and crafts piece of furniture, as well known as Mission Way furniture. Unlike the British manufacturers, the Americans, through techniques of mass production, were able to brand their goods affordable to the centre class. Two of the manufacturers, Elbert Hubbard and Gustav Stickley, played a major role in promoting the Arts and crafts ideals.
Hubbard, who had made his fortune every bit salesman and partner in the Larkin Soap Company, claimed to accept met William Morris. He began with a publishing visitor in 1895 nether the imprint of Roycroft, a name derived from the seventeenth century English volume-binders. As the business expanded, he added a bindery and a leather working shop. By 1901, Roycroft began manufacturing a line of furniture in the Arts and Crafts style. Although he was not a designer, Hubbard used his business acumen to create a need for his books, furniture, and modest metalwork. The company survived his death on the Lusitania in 1915 but could not survive the change in gustation in the 1920s or the Slap-up Depression. By 1938, the company was sold at sale.xiii*
Like Elbert Hubbard, Gustav Stickley, created a veritable empire of Arts and Crafts goods with a strong philosophical underpining. Dissimilar Hubbard, Stickley possessed a technical background in furniture manufacturing. Trained past his father to be a stonemason, Stickley learned the furniture manufacturing trade from his uncle.14 By 1898, he founded the Gustav Stickley Company in Eastwood, New York, near Syracuse. Stickley besides promulgated his Arts and Crafts ideals in The Craftsman, a magazine he started in 1901. The kickoff two issues of The Craftsman paid homage to Morris and Ruskin.15
Stickley introduced his new designs at the Grand Rapids Furniture Fair in the summer of 1900. His firm, United Crafts, soon inverse to Craftsman Workshops. He hoped to create a unified design past organizing "a order of cabinetmakers, metallic and leather workers, formed for the production of household furnishing" like to that of Morris and Co. in England. The furniture manufactured at the Craftsman Workshop was sold not but at the manufacturing plant and Craftsman stores in Boston and Washington, merely also at Arts and Crafts exhibitions besides as over fifty major retailers located throughout the land.xvi
Compages, too, was part of the Arts and crafts movement. From the exquisite oriental influenced designs of the Greene and Greene houses in Pasadena to the mass marketed Sears & Roebuck mail order bungalows, there was a craftsman style firm for every budget. The construction was honest featuring few frills, a love of wood, and inspiration from nature. Pergolas, sleeping porches, and terraces helped erase the boundaries betwixt the house and the garden surrounding information technology. Considering the blueprint of the house was to encourage a closely knit family, fireplaces and dining rooms were important features. A modest room chosen an inglenook provided a retreat next to the fireplace where the family could get together. I promoter of bungalows wrote in 1911, "A bungalow without a fireplace would be about as much an anomaly equally a garden without flowers."17
In California, the Arts and crafts firm was interpreted by many architects, including Greene & Greene in Pasadena, Bernard Maybeck in Berkeley, and Irving Gill and Richard Requa in San Diego. The California style drew inspiration not simply from oriental designs but also from the California missions and other early adobe buildings. Irving Gill'south style evolved from the more traditional Arts and Crafts style of the Marston House to a fashion incorporating the massive walls and arcades of the Mission style every bit exemplified by the La Jolla Woman's Club. Gill envisioned a "simple cube house with creamy walls, sheer and patently, ascension boldly into the sky unrelieved by cornices or overhang of roof, unornamented save for the vines."xviii
The Arts and crafts motility came to San Diego not simply in the bungalows and houses designed by architects but also by the craftsmen who created California Cathay Products Visitor tiles, Valentien pottery, and Markham pottery, which was distributed by Orr's Gallery. Anna Valentien also made hammered copper metalware and jewelry for J. Jessop & Sons.nineteen Local stores served as outlets for nationally distributed Craft goods. The housewife seeking Roycroft wares would find them merely at J. Jessop & Sons, Inc., Jewelers, Stationers.20 Marston'due south Section Shop advertised that they were the sole amanuensis for "Genuine Craftsman Furniture."21 Teco Pottery could be purchased at Alfred Stahel & Son,22 while Rockwood Pottery was bachelor at the studio of lensman Harold A. Taylor.23
The Craft movement came to an end past the first of World State of war I. The death of Elbert Hubbard, the bankruptcy of Gustav Stickley in 1916 when his expansion, which included the Craftsman Farms, an role edifice /exhibit, and other enterprises proved to be financially unsound, as well as the alter in national gustation, were the undoing of this style. Examples of both decorative arts and compages remain, all the same, to remind us of the quest for designs that were a joy to produce and a joy to utilise.
The term "living room" replaced "parlor" during the Arts & Crafts period. This illustration from the May, 1903, outcome of The Craftsman shows a cozy inglenook.
The "less is more" philosophy of the Arts & Crafts Movement is axiomatic in this illustration of a dining room from the May, 1903, issue of The Craftsman.
Magazines such every bit The Craftsman, published by Gustav Stickley, and The Fra, published by Elbert Hubbard, helped disseminate the ideals of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.
Numerous American art pottery companies helped make full the demand for decorative objects to compliment the Arts & Crafts interior.
Marston'south department shop advertizement"
Marston's department shop advertised that it was the "sole amanuensis" for Gustav Stickely's Craftsman article of furniture in the San Diego Union of 25 November, 1912.
Markham Pottery moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to National City in 1913, and received a gold medal at the Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego in 1915.
Limbert'due south in Grand Rapids, Michigan"
Limbert'southward was ane of several companies in K Rapids, Michigan, that produced Arts & Crafts furniture.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Wendy Kaplan, "The Lamp of British Precedent: An Introduction to the Arts and Crafts Motion," in Wendy Kaplan, "The Fine art that is Life": The Arts & Crafts Motility in America, 1875-1920 (Boston, 1987), 52.
2. Quoted in Kaplan, "The Lamp of British Precedent," 52.
3. Ibid., 55.
iv. Ibid., 56.
5. Ellen Paul Denker and Bert Randall Denker, "Mary Louise McLaughlin," in Kaplan, Arts & Crafts Movement, 249.
six. Martin Eidelberg, "Fine art Pottery," in Robert Judson Clark, ed., The Arts & Crafts Move in America, 1876-1916 (Princeton, 1972), 119.
7. Ibid., 136.
8. Ibid., 144.
nine. Bruce Kamerling, "Anna and Albert Valentien: The Arts and crafts Movement in San Diego," Journal of San Diego History 24 (Summer 1978), 345-47.
10. Ibid., 347, 51, 57, sixty.
11. "California China Products Visitor," in San Diego and the American Fine art Pottery Movement, San Diego History Center, brochure produced in conjunction with the "New Vistas Exhibit," from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit Service.
12. Robert Judson Clark, "The Eastern Seaboard," in Clark, ed., Craft Move, 45.
thirteen. Ibid., 38.
xiv. Kaplan, "The Lamp of British Precedent," 57.
xv. Quoted in Catherine Zusy, "Gustav Stickley and the Craftsman Workshops," in Kaplan, Arts & Crafts Move, 243.
16. Richard Guy Wilson, "American Arts and Crafts Compages: Radical though Dedicated to the Cause Conservative," in Kaplan, Arts & Crafts Movement, 102-05, quoting, 103.
17. Quoted in Ibid., 124-25.
18. Kamerling, "Anna and Albert Valentien," 349.
19. Charles F. Hamilton, Roycroft Collections, (San Diego and New York, 1980), 66.
20. San Diego Union, 25 November 1912, 11:2-7.
21. An example of Teco Pottery in the San Diego History Center Curatorial Department has a Stahel paper label.
22. Advertisement in Beatrice de Lack Krombach (Leslie Ray), ed., Cookbook of San Diego, (San Diego, 1917), illustrated by Mildred Stillman Gill.
[* ed. note: footnotes appear to exist off by one number, starting with number 12].
Source: https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1990/april/arts/#:~:text=The%20American%20Arts%20and%20Crafts,the%20necessities%20of%20everyday%20life.
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