The Stickley Museum At Craftsman Farms

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We’re pausing our virtual tour this week to showcase some of the artists whose work will be featured in our December trunk show. On Monday, we showed you Dianne Ayres’ textile art, today we’re talking about Rosalind Nzinga Nichol’s works.

Rosalind Nzinga Nichol describes her work:

I am a mixed media artist, papermaker and teacher. I began work as an illustrator before developing an interest in mixed media painting and papier-mache sculptures while working a muralist for about twenty years. Since 2000 I have also become a papermaker. Currently my work is focused on combining painting with papermaking as a single medium. I love introducing new students to the ancient art of papermaking. There is a special spiritual quality about this artform that transcends skill sets and allows anyone the opportunity to explore their inner creativity. I make my art and one-of-a-kind stationery products using vintage textiles as inclusions and teach papermaking from my studio in Orange and throughout Northern New Jersey.

For more information, visit her website at TeaAndWings.com or her blog.

Watch this space for more of our trunk show’s artists and artwork!

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Textile artist Dianne Ayres is just one of the artists whose works will be featured in our upcoming trunk show.

The workshop of Dianne Ayres began in 1988 to create textiles in the Arts & Crafts style for the home, including draperies, window curtains, bedspreads, pillows & table runners. Dianne’s workshop uses traditional techniques to make reproductions of period designs and their own Arts & Crafts inspired designs.

She also executes designs for other artists and architects as custom textiles. Dianne and her husband, Timothy Hansen, also collect the linens and the literature of the period, lecture, research and write on textiles and interiors.

Watch this space to learn more about the artists involved in the Stickley Museum’s Holiday Trunk Show!

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The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms’ Holiday Trunk Show will be held on December 6 &7, from 11:00 to 4:00.

Original works by Dianne Ayres, Zachary Bloom,  Rosalind Nzinga Nichol, Stewart Crick, Laura Wilder, Janet Taylor Pickett, Door Pottery and Motawi Tile will be available.

Tags:   December · Dianne Ayres · Door Pottery · Holiday trunk show · Janet Taylor Pickett · Laura Wilder · Motawi Tile · Rosalind Nzinga Nichol · Stewart Crick · Zachary BloomNo Comments.

As we all gather with our loved ones for Thanksgiving, we ask you to give some thought to those who are less fortunate.  The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms will be participating in the 13th Annual Jersey Cares Coat Drive.  Gently-used winter coats will be accepted by the Museum between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. from December 2 through December 14.  The coats will be delivered to the Jersey Cares Coat Warehouse in Hillside, New Jersey for distribution to 20,000 to at-risk men, women, children and infants. Please help us reach out to help our neighbors who have fallen on hard times this winter.

For more information, visit the Jersey Cares Coat Drive web page.

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Many new activities have been added to The Stickley Museum’s Annual Holiday Open House which takes place during the first two weekends in December.  This year’s event will take place between 11:00 and 4:00 on all four days and will offer something for all ages.  The log house will be decked out for the holidays as Stickley and his family would have decorated it.  Evergreen garlands will festoon the staircase and poinsettias, which Stickley described as “the Christmas Flaming Star,” will brighten the three fireplaces. A unique collection of holiday cards from the period will be on display.

On Saturdays during both weekends, “Mrs. Claus” will visit the Log House from 11:00 to 2:00 to talk about the 1899 origin of Mrs. Claus and other seasonal rituals of the period, such as the introduction of the tin cookie cutter and the lavish dessert buffet.  Children can also participate in activities based on holiday celebrations in the early 1900’s such as orange clove pomanders, paper chain garlands, tin stars, stringing popcorn, and of course sampling yummy holiday treats like freshly baked gingerbread or warm mulled cider.

On the first weekend of the Open House, the Museum will present a Holiday Trunk Show. This event features the work of skilled artisans from across the country and is designed to offer families an alternative to the frenzied shopping mall experience.  While parents check off names on their Christmas shopping list by buying beautiful, handmade items, their children can have fun in another part of the museum.

Throughout the Trunk Show weekend, furniture maker Stewart Crick will demonstrate the techniques he uses in creating his Arts and Crafts inspired furniture. The Arts and Crafts views and philosophies that spawned an opposition to mass-produced furniture, and advanced a return to the virtuous qualities of the independent craftsman, mirror Stu’s design perspective. Honest lines and simple curves, guided by natural forces, and patient attention to details make up his guiding philosophy.

On the second weekend of the Open House, The Museum will present holiday performances.  On Saturday, December 13, The Joyful Noise Handbell Choir from the First Presbyterian Church of Whippany will ring in the holiday season between 1:00 and 3:30. Also on Saturday, Homer Hanson will demonstrate the art of paper-cutting from 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. On Sunday, December 14, the Community Theatre Performing Arts Company will sing holiday favorites at 1:00 & 2:00 p.m.

Watch this space in the next few weeks as we feature the artists involved in our Holiday Trunk Show!

Tags:   Community Theatre Performing Arts Company · December · Holiday trunk show · holidays · Homer Hanson · Joyful Noise Handbell Choir · Stewart CrickNo Comments.

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We’re in the living room today, looking at the inlaid piano, although there is also a Stickley piano upstairs in the girls’ bedroom.

Inlaid Piano
Dimensions: 62 1/2″ W x 57″ H x 29″ D
Materials: Oak with inlays of pewter, oak and tinted woods
Works: Serial number 37370. Works manufactured by the Everett Piano Company, Boston
Inlay panels and marquetry band: Made by the firm of George H. Jones, New York City
Date: ca. 1905 - 1906
Unmarked
Designer: Harvey Ellis
Gift by Paul Fiore to The Craftsman Farms Foundation.

Apparently the first piano built by Stickley’s firm was the one photographed for the October 1903 issue of The Craftsman. Certainly designed by Harvey Ellis, it had an elegant rectilinear case of dark fumed oak. The flat surface above the keyboard had a central music rack flanked by inlaid rectangular panels.

These decorative panels consisted of a stylized plant stem rising through an oval motif and terminating in a bright spot of color, a “blossom.” The blossom was placed within a small rectangle bisected by a line of string inlay that formed a larger rectangle; this is a visually satisfying unifying motif, with the two inlaid rectangles repeating the shape of the panels they are set into. The surface below the keyboard was a gridded panel. Its horizontal and vertical lines were echoed in the laths of the music rack as well as in the rectangular decorative channels cut into the front and sides of the case. At the top of the case, there was a shaped and beveled cornice surmounting a line of applied dentil molding.

Stickley took this first piano home to his Columbus Avenue house, and later, when the family left Syracuse to move to New Jersey, it went into the girls’ bedroom at Craftsman Farms. It was inherited by his second daughter, Mildred, and remains with her descendants. This piano has eighty-five keys and two pedals, and its work are by Carl Rhönisch, a German firm that also manufactured works for pianos designed by M. H. Baillie Scott. A replica of this piano case, made in 2003 by Mitchell Andrus is now in the girls’ bedroom.

The piano originally in the log house living room is now lost, though it was similar to other Craftsman pianos now known. They have eighty-eight keys, three pedals, and works made either by Vose & Son, Boston, or, like the present example, by the Everett Piano Company. The cases of these pianos are slightly different from the first piano. Instead of a separate music rack, for instance, they have a gridded panel above the keyboard, and their feet are made of heavier, more substantial boards. These minimum variations aside, the cases remained essentially unchanged for the remaining ten or so years that inlaid Craftsman pianos were made. Including the piano now at Craftsman Farms, there are perhaps six examples of this rare model known today.

Though The Craftsman magazine often published Craftsman interiors that included the firm’s pianos, Stickley’s catalogs rarely showed them. A drawing of a Craftsman piano appeared in the booklet “Chips from the Craftsman Workshops” (1907), and photographs were published in the catalogs “Some Chips from the Craftsman Workshops” (1909) and “Craftsman Furnishings for the Home (1912). The promotional copy in these two catalogs sheds light on the rarity of Craftsman pianos today. According to the 1909 catalog: “We have one of the pianos on exhibition in our New York showrooms and one in Boston, and will gladly furnish by mail any particulars concerning them.” This is evidence that the firm made samples for retail display and did not keep pianos in stock. The 1912 catalog offered the piano without inlay, saying, “we find that many people do not wish to buy a piano as expensive as our original design, and others would prefer the piano case simpler, without the decorative inlay in wood.” The price of the piano without inlay was $450 and the inlaid version – its price not given in either catalog – would have sold for more. $450 amounted to a considerable outlay in an era when many middle class families were living on incomes of about $1,000 to $1,500 a year. With or without inlay, the handsome Craftsman piano was evidently too high-priced for Stickley’s middle-class customers and it is likely that few were made.

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This week’s featured piece is the Eastwood chair. This reading chair is in the living room, with the hexagonal library table, the #2341 Morris chair and the big library table.
#347 Eastwood chair
Dimensions: 36″ W x 37″ H x 31 1/2″ D
Materials: Oak
Date: Ca 1912
Mark: Burned-in joiner’s compass
Designer: Attributed to LaMont Warner
Gift by Paul Fiore to The Craftsman Farms Foundation

In 1972, when Robert Judson Clark interviewed Stickley’s oldest daughter, Barbara Wiles, she said her father “read all the while,” favoring art books and biographies. It is tempting to think that Stickley retreated to the capacious embrace of his Eastwood chair at the north end of the log house living room to do that reading, but we can only guess whether that was true. Still, he seems to have had an Eastwood chair in his Syracuse home as well as at Craftsman Farms, enough evidence to suggest that he favored this design. The present example is not original to the house.

This forthright, out-sized armchair is an emphatically self-confident American product, but its roots lie in a diminutive British armchair that appeared in a 1901 catalog of furniture designed by the architect M. H. Baillie Scott. Yet Stickley’s designers re-imagined the scale and structure and functional qualities of that chair so thoroughly that they made it wholly a Craftsman product. The Eastwood chair was first made in late 1901, but its massiveness and rectilinearity have little in common with many Stickley pieces produced that year and instead point the way to the 1902 designs that mark the high point of Craftsman furniture production. Given Stickley’s superb eye for visually harmonious forms, it is not surprising that he placed his Eastwood chair in the log house living room next to a substantial, largely rectilinear, and evidently one-of-a-kind oak and leather-upholstered settle, a design typical of his best 1902 furniture.

Its visual refinements are few. It does have, however, inverted V-form arches that span the undersides of the arms as well as light catching “clipped corners” at the arms’ front ends.

The bowed, horizontal back slats elegantly angle into the rear stiles, but the back cushion hides this subtle detail.

The Eastwood chair has little articulated joinery. The front legs are mortised through the arms, but otherwise there are no revealed tenons. The mortise and tenon joints that fasten the legs to the stretchers are hidden, though they are locked together with visible dowels that punctuate the surface. But there are none of Stickley’s favored tenon-and-key joints and, except for those on the arms, there are no revealed tenons standing proud of any wooden surface of this chair. Yet the Eastwood chair in its entirety is an expression of pure structure: strong, over scale oak planks arranged into straight horizontal and vertical lines. It may be first and foremost a chair meant for comfort, but it is also a powerful composition of rectangles, and the size and shape and interrelationship of its rectangular solids and voids create a visually satisfying composition. Though to some eyes the Eastwood chair is too big and boxy, its design manages to be both viscerally satisfying and highly sophisticated.

Have you seen all the other featured pieces from our collection?

Tags:   #347 Eastwood chair · hexagonal library table · living room · morris chair1 Comment