The #625 oak lamp, circa 1909, with its copper and glass shade shows the variety in Stickley's later designs.
:Of the seminal Arts and Crafts exhibitions of the past few decades, none more accurately reflects what it was like to have lived during the period than the recently opened exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, "At Home with Gustav Stickley." If there is a clue to be shed as to why, it is that the majority of the properties in the exhibit are on loan from the "lived-in" collection of Stephen Gray and practically still warm from use.
Gray has been building his collection since the mid-1970s, when he began furnishing an Eighteenth Century farmhouse in Columbia County, N.Y. As the collection grew, his passion for Gustav Stickley's work spawned a business. Operating as Turn of the Century Editions, Gray became a leading publisher of books on the American Arts and Crafts Movement, reprinting Stickley's and other manufacturers' trade catalogs. Serendipitously, just about the time Gray believed the collection "had evolved to the epitome of where I wanted it to be," two curators from the Wadsworth Athenaeum toured the house and experienced a "revelatory moment," as Linda Roth, co-curator of the exhibit, put it.
Gray's home was as honest a representation of America's "Craftsman Style" as is possible. In addition to the handsome, dark quartersawn oak furniture for which Stickley is known, the ambience was enlivened with Arthur Wesley Dow woodprints in period frames, Newcomb, Overbeck, Teco and Grueby pottery and tiles. Both Roth and Elizabeth Betsy Kornhauser, also co-curator, as well as the Krieble curator of American paintings and sculptures, saw the potential for exhibition in Gray's collection.
Gustav Stickley's classic "Eastwood” chair with "Seat #725,” a footstool with cross-stretcher base, circa 1901.
Fortunately, Gray was in a similar frame of mind. The time had come to share his collection with a larger audience. He thought he could he could live without some of his furnishings for a while if he moved things around.
The genius behind the "look" that captivated a population caught at the crossroads of industry and technology at the turn of the last century was Gustav Stickley, a cabinetmaker from Syracuse, N.Y. Until 1900, Stickley, who, as a teenager had turned commercial, spent a few years making revival-style furniture. As the first year of the new century rolled into the second, he rolled out a rectilinear line of 61 designs in the tradition of Mission-style furniture. It was a huge departure from Victorian abundance and Stickley promoted the quartersawn oak pieces as "new furniture."
His timing was perfect. Customers connected with the spiritual quality of the work. They flocked to his monthly magazine,
The Craftsman
, which was as much a stylebook for progressive living as it was a catalog. It fostered the underlying themes of the Arts and Crafts Movement as they had evolved in Europe. In essence, Stickley was talking to the masses that were dissatisfied with the industrial way of life at a complex moment in history.
