Arts and Crafts (Craftsman) Style Furniture
Arts and Crafts and Craftsman Style Furniture and Hardware
Arts and Crafts and Craftsman Style Furniture and Hardware Characterized by a generous handmade feel, the Arts and Crafts Movement influenced art, architecture and design from around 1860 to as late as 1930. The Victorian period, with its new cultural markers of factories and slums, suffered from what some felt were the evils of urbanization and mechanization. Initiated by progressive thinkers in England, the movement sought to replace what they perceived as the shoddy productions of the factory with vigorous and meaningful aesthetic objects.
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Early Leaders and Characteristics
Philip Morris and his associates looked to the medieval past, before the era of mass-production, for inspiration. A rejection of the pallid industrialization of modern life drove the Arts and Crafts movement forward. Qualities the artists valued were an appearance of handcraft, a sense of the organic and the use of naturally-occurring materials.
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Characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement is a look of stylized natural forms. These bold patterns of leaves, flowers and animal shapes derive equally from the countryside as from the man-made works of the distant past. Indeed, the leaders of the movement, including Morris as well as the writer and artist John Ruskin and the architect Augustus Pugin, took more from medieval buildings and books than from the natural world. Visible traces of the worker's handiwork, the process of production, is a hallmark of Arts and Crafts style.
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The Worldwide Phenomenon
The Arts and Crafts movement struck a chord worldwide. In the United States, the art and furniture created after the Arts and Crafts model was called Craftsman style. The focus of the Craftsman designers and artists became domestic life, and how to reconcile humanity with modernity. They believed that things of beauty, well-made, could better people's lives. The great value placed today on Craftsman furniture and houses, beautiful and livable, attests to their success.
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Gustav Stickley was one of the movement's most influential voices. Born the son of a Midwestern stonemason, he established a furniture-makers guild after the medieval model. With his workers, he endeavored to create furniture of good materials with clean, simple design. Emphasizing inherent qualities of the wood itself, such as color and grain, his work included both hand-built and machined components. Stately, plain and massive, Stickley's furniture calls to mind the wood products of the country's rapidly disappearing rural past.
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A Major Force in the United States
Throughout the United States, architects built houses in Craftsman style and designers filled these houses with simply-designed, well-made furnishings. A development of the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman movement called Prairie School combined medieval elements with modern. As practiced by Frank Lloyd Wright and his peers, Prairie Style resulted in houses with strong verticals and deep horizontal overhangs. The surface articulation of multiple small spaces and the satisfying combinations of natural color recalled both Tudor houses and contemporary urban buildings.
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Details and hardware evocative of natural forms are central to Arts and Crafts and Craftsman works. Organic materials, wood, glass and metal, give shape to motifs and colors inspired by nature and works of the medieval world. The hammered brass of a switch plate, for example, makes use of an ancient material for a current need. The texture suggest the presence of the maker, and the surface, too, with its pleasing patina of age, recalls an older time.
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A porch sconce with a milk glass shade in the form of a gently turned flame combines beauty with function. Milk glass both brightens and filters the light. The simple, angular grace of the sconce itself, like an arm holding forward a lantern, complements the flowing lines of the shade.
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That these pieces of hardware are themselves beautiful and complementary of the elements around them is typical of the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman movements, with their emphasis on an organic whole.
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