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| A Message from Dr. Robert Winter |
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Morris Rocking Chair
HS0030 |
A sign of our times is the sensational popularity of Arts
and Crafts furniture. What only a few years ago we assigned to the basement
(it was too heavy to take to the attic), we now treasure in our living
rooms. My grandfather sold Stickley furniture, be he was not above making
fun of it: “It’s the sort of thing that can throw at your wife,
and it won’t hurt the furniture a bit,” he was fond of saying
in his male chauvinist period, though he never did throw any of it at
my grandmother.
The Arts and Crafts movement was at its high point in America
in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It started as a protest
against the fussy, gerry-built chairs and tables and badly designed ceramics
mass produced by nineteenth century artisans. Its British father, William
Morris, despised the factory and the machine which he believed took the
personality of the individual craftsman out of the product of his or her
labors thus debasing industry and thereby society. He wanted to go back
to hand-crafts, to a better time when you could see the love of the worker
in the work. He wanted a revolution.
The American followers of Morris accepted his criticism of
shoddy goods, but they were, most of them, not revolutionaries. They devoted
themselves to the production of good, solid furniture, but they had no
qualms about using the machines to aid their efforts. That is why I am
so thrilled to see the sow where Warren Hile’s workmen, using machines
as their friend, turn out reproductions of chairs, tables, bookcases etc.
made by Gustav Stickley and his contemporaries that are as finely if not
better crafted than their models.
Although liberties have been taken with the design of the
original furniture, most of it harkens back to the ideas of the early
twentieth century. Some nostalgia lies behind the popularity of designs
of an earlier day, but I would like to think that the renewal of interest
in the Arts and Crafts that has now persisted longer than the original
movement is due to a recognition of the high quality of workmanship that
William Morris desired. All of us who admire the incredible technological
advancement of our age want to see some soul in our computers. Not finding
it there, we look for it in our houses. We find it in beautifully crafted
furniture.
— Dr. Robert Winter
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