Design notes

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Associated Artists

The remarkable social reformer and interior designer Candace Wheeler is the subject of an exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through January 6, 2002 (see The Magazine ANTIQUES for October 2001, pp. 400, 402). A walk through this stunning show makes one want to race home, toss out everything, and redecorate. An excellent place to start would be with the fine reproduction wallpapers and textiles, after originals by Wheeler, that are being manufactured by the firm J. R. Burrows and Company of Rockland, Massachusetts.

The extremely successful interior decorating firm of Louis C. Tiffany and Company Associated Artists included Wheeler, Tiffany, Samuel Colman, and Lockwood de Forest. One of its most significant decorating jobs was the hall and principal ground-floor rooms in Mark Twain's nineteen-room house in Hartford, Connecticut (now the Mark Twain Memorial). The 1881 commission succeeded in transforming the dark Victorian rooms into much lighter spaces, which, in the words of Twain's daughter, Clara Clemens Samossoud, had a "suggestively divine quality."

Illustrated here are some of the wallpapers and textiles designed by Wheeler that the Burrows firm has reproduced from the collection in the Mark Twain Memorial. One of them, Japanese Carp, is also available as a fabric with hand- embroidery in silk and metallic threads executed by Elizabeth Creeden of Trustworth Studios in Plymouth, Massachusetts (illustrated at far right, bottom).

In 1881 Wheeler won a first prize of one thousand dollars from Warren, Fuller and Company of New York City for a design for a wallpaper, Honeybee (illustrated at far left). A room decorated with this paper and its accompanying border survives in the Hall-Fowler Memorial Library in Ionia, Michigan. The Burrows reproduction is based on the original colorway and is hand-printed in New England.