Made at the height of production years, unlike early forms, this masterpiece used through-tenon joinery. Chiffonier from the Rohlfs' home by Charles Rohlfs, circa 1901, oak and copper, 65 3/8 inches tall. Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum, gift of Roland Rohlfs. All photos, except where noted, by Gavin Ashworth ©American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation.
:"The Rohlfs style is something new and it belongs in a class by itself. Try your best and you cannot place it in association with anything else," exuded magazine author Will Clemens in 1900 in regard to the unique furnishings designed and executed by Charles Rohlfs during the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Unmistakable in style and form, they are truly as individual as the man who created them.
His pieces are often categorically lumped into the simplistic forms of the Arts and Crafts Movement by today's collectors. The furniture maker, however, emphatically denied links or similarities of his elaborately carved forms to the Victorian, medieval or Art Nouveau periods, and most especially to the Arts and Crafts Movement.
"My designs are my own. I evolve them. They are like those of no other period nor people...I do not read Ruskin nor anybody nor anything that might influence my ideas. I never get them from books...They are mine and into their execution I put all my heart and force and that is why they appeal," Rohlfs stated unconditionally in a January 1900 article published in
House Beautiful.
Rohlfs regarded himself an American original and, in fact, he was, thereby making it hard to place him into any one descriptive category, something akin to fitting the proverbial square peg into the round hole.
He claimed that his individual inspiration came from the natural grain of oak in conjunction with his own arty imagination, terming his creations "Artistic Furniture" or, simply, "The Rohlfs Style."
"American Originals: The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs," the first major museum exhibition dedicated to the furniture maker, takes steps to define and explore the iconic furniture maker. Organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM)
,
the Chipstone Foundation
and the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation
(ADAF), the exhibition is curated by ADAF curator Joseph Cunningham and organized in Milwaukee by Sarah Fayen, Chipstone's curator.
The living room of the Charles Rohlfs home on Park Street, circa 1920. The Winterthur Library.
The exhibition recently began its five-venue national tour at MAM and is on view there through August 23. It brings together more than 45 examples from Rohlfs' rich body of works, while also presenting new and exciting research compiled from the Rohlfs family archives, much of which has now been donated to Winterthur, forming the core of the Charles Rohlfs Archive at the Winterthur Library.
Charles Rohlfs was born in 1853, the son of a German immigrant who worked as a cabinetmaker for piano companies in Brooklyn, N.Y. He trained in drafting and design at the Cooper Union in New York City, later becoming a successful patternmaker of cast-iron stoves. His woodcarving skills were brought to the surface and finely honed over the years as he carved the intricately designed wooden forms that would ultimately be used as molds for the stoves.
Rohlfs initially appeared in the Brooklyn City Directory as a "patternmaker," although, reflecting his admiration for the stage, he changed that to "actor" in 1881. Soon after, he married the successful mystery novelist Anna Katharine Green in 1884
.
