STICKLEY, GUSTAV 1857-1942
Furniture designer
The Craftsman
Inspired by British art critic John Ruskin and British painter-designer William Morris, Gustav Stickley created a distinctly American approach to furniture design, following their call for a return to the medieval reliance on fine craftsmanship based on solid training and respect for the innate qualities of the craftsman's materials. Founding what became known as the Craftsman movement, he adapted Morris's handmade approach to creating furniture that integrated colonial, Art Nouveau, Mission, and European peasant design into an original, vigorous, straightforward style. Extensively imitated in his own time, Stickley's designs are now recognized as the embodiment of a modern American sensibility that relied primarily on function and the natural beauty of indigenous materials, rather than on design elements of the past and exotic woods.
The Stickley Brothers
Gustav Stickley was born on 9 March 1857 in Osceola, Wisconsin, the eldest of eleven children, six of whom would become furniture makers. After his father abandoned the family during the 1870s, his mother took her children to Brandt, Pennsylvania, where her brother operated a chair factory. There Stickley learned to love working with wood and to appreciate its natural color, texture, and grain, and within a few years he had taken over the business. In 1884 Stickley opened a wholesale and retail furniture store with two of his younger brothers, Charles and Albert, in Binghamton, New York. The shop would have failed without the heavy financial backing from the town of Binghamton, which commissioned him to design and manufacture furniture. Because the Stickley Brothers did not have enough money to buy machinery and were forced to make most of their stock by hand, they designed furniture with simple lines, and emphasized the functionality and plain shapes that recalled some of the elements of colonial furniture design. By the late 1880s Stickley had become interested in Shaker designs, often taking his entire family to visit the Shaker settlement in New Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
Refining the Craft
In 1892 several of Stickley's brothers moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they started another Stickley Brothers factory and produced designs that borrowed heavily from their eldest brother's style. During the same decade Stickley began to experiment with ideas gleaned from his reading of Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. By the late 1890s Stickley had become an expert at creating precise reproductions of colonial furniture. His first trips to Europe at the turn of the century, however, and his association with Irene Sargent, a well-known architectural critic, inspired him to study modern furniture. In France and Germany Stickley met the greatest artists of the Art Nouveau movement. In England he developed a keen interest in the Arts and Crafts style, which, he would later say, was "more in harmony with what I had in mind." From these European designers Stickley learned to appreciate organic, tapered lines and natural form. Yet he rejected exuberant "sculptural" shapes that interfered with the function of the object. For Stickley, furniture that was not primarily functional was absurd.
The Mission Style
Stickley is perhaps best known for the Mission Style of furniture, constructed of quartersawn oak that was treated with fumed ammonia to preserve and emphasize the wood grain. Mission Style furniture was functional, beautiful, and easy to care for. He made this furniture at the Craftsman Workshop in Eastwood, New York, established in 1900. The next year Stickley's firm began publishing his magazine, The Craftsman, which provided a forum for his philosophy of design, as well as articles on social reform, town planning, and even complete house designs. Early in the first decade of the twentieth century, Stickley also began experimenting with painted Chinese Chippendale furniture. In 1903 he organized an Arts and Crafts exhibition of American and European artifacts and handicrafts in Syracuse and Rochester. He continued to be inspired by a variety of historic, Asian, and modern influences for the rest of his life. By the 1910s Stickley's Mission Style was a fixture in American design and inspired other architects and designers, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who shared Stickley's love of clean, functional lines and the inherent beauty of well-chosen materials. In 1913 Stickley opened his twelve-story Craftsman Building in Manhattan, complete with display areas for his furniture and textiles, gardens, and a restaurant that served food grown on his own farm. Although The Craftsman, Inc., went out of business in 1915, Stickley continued to experiment with wood finishes and designs until his death in 1942.
Sources:
John Crosby Freeman, The Forgotten Rebel: Gustav Stickley and His Craftsman Mission Furniture (Watkins Glen, N.Y.: Century House, 1966);
Coy L. Ludwig, The Arts & Crafts Movement in New York State, 1890s-1920s (Hamilton: Gallery Association of New York State, 1983).
