Furniture designed at the Byrd Cliffe Arts and Crafts Colony

Magazine Antiques, May, 2003 by Robert Edwards

Since the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony in Woodstock, New York, in 1984 and 1985, the furniture produced there has been of great interest to students of the arts and crafts movement in the United States. Examples are now in the decorative arts collections of the most important American museums, but there has been little study of the sources that inspired Byrdcliffe designers.

Research has focused so far on the founders of the colony, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Jane Byrd Whitehead (nee McCall), and their connections to the major figures of the arts and crafts movement, documented by the vast Byrdcliffe archives given to the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, in 1991.

Byrdcliffe furniture looks the way it does not just because of when it was designed and who designed it. The method of construction is also an important factor. Connoisseurs of American furniture have always taken a hard line about joinery. For them the beauty of a finely cut dovetail is as much moral as it is aesthetic. Continental Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the British, are not so sanctimonious. Who could guess how an eighteenth-century painted Venetian commode supports itself on such insubstantial curled legs? By the end of the nineteenth century Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was having his designs for exaggerated high-backed chairs made in Scotland, and Francois Rupert Carabin (1862-1932) was lashing naked ladies to tables in France. Their furniture was uniquabout design, and they had no reverence for the niceties of construction. At the same time in the United States, designers like Gustav Stickley (1858--1942) were more comfortable with their puritanical interpretation of the directives of the arts and crafts movement. Mumbo jumbo about honest construction and truth to materials was taken seriously here, even if it was primarily a marketing ploy. The appearance of handcraftsmanship was and still is an important signifier of American arts and crafts production, yet Byrdcliffe furniture seldom has the loose-pin joinery or heavy-handed chisel marks that would establish its handmade status.

The furniture produced at Byrdcliffe seems to me at odds with the American arts and crafts standard. One obvious reason is that the founder was British and thus lacked the American puritan spirit. Also, Whitehead's inept sketches suggest that his education left him with an artistic sensibility but without the skills to create art of any sort. (2) He evidently studied woodworking in Paris, and later, while waiting to finalize a divorce from his first wife, he took woodworking courses in Germany Unfortunately, we can only guess at what he made as a student. He probably made several tables and desks with bulbous legs used at Arcady, the grand house he began building in 1894 in Montecito, California. He asked his second wife, Jane, to execute the drawings and then had others make the turned parts. At Byrdcliffe he seems to have had little to do with the actual construction of the furniture. In my judgment Whitehead's eccentric sense of proportion is his most obvious contribution to the design of Byrdcliffe furni ture.

The Whiteheads' art education played a significant role in the appearance of Byrdcliffe furniture. Their taste in household furnishings was formed by their close association with British, French, and Italian art experts. White Pines, the Whiteheads' home at Byrdcliffe, was a gloomy place by the time their son Peter (1901--1976) died. The burlap on the walls had darkened to the color of dried blood, and the green-stained woodwork had faded to a murky tone. Those dulled colors certainly seem to fit the idea of an arts and crafts interior of the kind frequently described in Stickley's Craftsman magazine. However, the interiors as they appeared after the house was completed in 1902 were rich with color and opulent materials. The Whiteheads were fond of scarlet silk brocades from Italy, and they purchased richly colored textiles from Morris and Company (see Pls. II and IV). They used silks and printed velvets with patterns designed by Charles F. A. Voy-sey (1857-1941), and they had examples of brilliantly glazed ceramics by William Frend De Morgan and Halsey Ralph Ricardo (see Pl. V). Along with reproductions of Italian Renaissance chairs they had furniture inlaid with ivory and exotic woods designed by George Washington Henry Jack (see P1. III) and Emile Galle (1846-1904). The walls were hung with huge watercolor reproductions of paintings by Raphael (1483-1520). The Whiteheads evidently worked together on the design of colorful stencils to be used in the interior of White Pines, but these were either not realized or have been lost under subsequent layers of wall coverings (see Pl. VII). Even so, the interiors must have been a riot of rich color and pattern that would surely have impressed and inspired the artists who arrived at the colony in the summer of 1903.

It is estimated that about fifty pieces of furniture were made at Byrdcliffe before production stopped in 1905. Only a few pieces were designed specifically for use at White Pines. The rest were supposed to be sold to the public. The many pieces remaining in the house in 1976 presumably had not found buyers. (3) We do not yet know how many pieces were actually sold, although it appears to be fewer than a dozen. The recent discovery of furniture that does not appear on the original inventories has increased that number slightly hut the marketing of Byrdcliffe furniture cannot be considered successful. Most arts and crafts furniture failed to meet the movement's criteria, and the Byrdcliffe product was no exception. It was not all made of indigenous woods, as John Ruskin (1819-1900) decreed. It sel dom had the exposed mortise-and-tenon joints that were the marks of honest joinery for Stickley. It was not made by the person who would ultimately use it, and it was very expensive, which meant that the common man s o central to democratic arts and crafts theory could not afford it.