Pottery with a New Orleans Flavor

 

QUESTION: I’ve always liked Arts and Crafts pottery. I understand that women made and decorated some of the different types of that pottery. One particular type that I’ve admired is Newcomb pottery. What can you tell me about it and the women who created it?

ANSWER: The years from the mid-1890s to just before World War I witnessed a progressive movement that affected not only the arts but the way people viewed how things were made.  During the second half of the 19th century, mass production of many products, including pottery, became common. This gave rise to a movement that looked back to when people made it by hand. At the same time, women began to look beyond the home to fulfill their lives. 

Newcomb Pottery was produced from 1895 to 1940. The company grew out of the pottery program at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, the women's college now associated with Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Pottery was a contemporary of other Arts and Crafts potteries, such as Rookwood, North Dakota, Teco, and Grueby.

Pottery decoration was one of the programs offered at the College since other Arts and Crafts potteries, such as the Rookwood Pottery in Cincinnati had begun employing women to decorate their pots This was one field where women could earn money in a respectable manner.

Under the tutelage of Professor William Woodward, advanced Newcomb art students participated in the Tulane Decorative Art League, which combined with the New Orleans Art League Pottery Club to take over the old New Orleans Art Pottery facility in 1890. Students employed their pottery decorating skills here until the Newcomb Pottery was organized in 1895. The Pottery Club encouraged Newcomb students with decorating experience to focus their artistic efforts on wares produced at the school facility. The plan was to establish a pottery program by converting a former chemistry laboratory into a pottery studio so that students could sell their wares and make the program self sufficient.

Two art professors, Ellsworth and William Woodward, who had been members of the faculty since the opening of Newcomb College became the driving forces behind the College’s art school. Ellsworth Woodward developed a curriculum in which women could be trained to earn money in a field other than the already acceptable vocation of teaching.

The first people the Woodwards hired to assist with the new pottery program were the potters. Unlike the artists who created and carved the designs for the Newcomb Pottery, the potters were all men. Even though the College was progressive for its day, the administration believed that only men could work the clay, throw the pots, fire the kiln, and handle the glazing. So they hired men to throw the pots, a task the school considered unladylike, beyond the abilities of the female students, and beneath their dignity  The first potter they hired in 1895 was a Frenchman named Jules Garby 1895. Joseph Meyer, one of Newcomb Pottery's most recognized potters, followed him in 1896, About the same time, the Woodwards hired the eccentric potter George Ohr. His tenure lasted for less than two years, at which time they fired him because they said he was unfit to instruct young ladies. Ohr went on to establish his own pottery in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1897.  

Jonathan Hunt replaced Meyer in 1927 and later Kenneth Smith in 1929. After Hunt left the Pottery in 1933, Francis Ford replaced him. Both Smith and Ford stayed with the Newcomb Pottery program through its termination in 1940.

Eventually, the Pottery designated women who worked regularly in it as craftsmen with a preference given to those who had completed an undergraduate degree and a later graduate studies program with the school’s art department.

The women were responsible for creating and carving designs for each piece of pottery the program produced. During the Pottery’s existence, they created and carved over 70,000 unique pieces.

Early pieces at the Pottery closely reflected the Arts and Crafts style. The pottery often depicted Louisiana's local flora, done in blue, yellow and green high glazes. Newcomb Pottery was at its peak from 1897 to 1917. During that time, the women experimented with various glazes and designs, winning many awards at exhibitions throughout the country and in Europe. 

As the school entered the 1920s, new professors arrived and began to introduce influences from the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. Highly carved pieces done in matt glazes of blue, green and pink marked this period. The Pottery introduced one of its most famous designs, the "Moon & Moss" style, during this time.

Newcomb Pottery also recruited pottery experts to help improve its product. Among them was Mary Given Sheerer from the Cincinnati area, originally hired to train the students in the slip-decorating techniques popularized at that time by the Rookwood Pottery.

Though training genteel young women was the Pottery’s main goal, the potters and students attempted a number of styles, as they sought to best use the raw materials available in the vicinity of New Orleans. The had originally planned to replicate the contemporary style of the Rookwood Pottery but that failed because slip-painting was unreliable in the hot and humid New Orleans climate. By 1900, Sheerer had to adapt her style, first to biscuit-painted designs and later to incised decorations, both under a high-gloss transparent glaze.

The potters also experimented with the types of clays they used to form the pots. The first clays they used fired either red or buff. A few years later, they used only clays from St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. They mixed these clays with loam gathered from the banks of the Mississippi River to produce white bodies.

With the end of the First World War, the popularity of the Arts and Crafts Movement waned. What had once seemed attractive and desirable because of its handmade qualities now looked rustic, old-fashioned and amateurish.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Pottery Through the Ages" in the 2022 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Origin of American Studio Pottery

 

QUESTION: I’ve always loved handmade pottery. And looking back over history, it seems to have existed since ancient times. Recently, a friend told me that Charles Binns was the father of American studio pottery. Exactly what does that mean? Isn’t all handmade pottery made in a studio?

ANSWER: While pottery, itself, has existed for eons, what’s referred to as “studio pottery” is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating to the very late 19th century and early 20th. 

Although now nearly forgotten, Charles Fergus Binns, a studio potter and instructor, enjoyed a national reputation during the early years of the 20th century for his classic stoneware pots. Binns' made many of his legendary stoneware vases, bottles, bowls and jars during the height of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the U.S.

Born in England in 1857, Binns left school at age 14 to become an apprentice at the Royal Worcester Porcelain Works, where his father was a co-managing director. Eventually, he occupied an administrative position at the Royal Worcester factory and  became a recognized scholar and lecturer concerning world ceramics. In Paris, in 1878, he exhibited his early experiments with clay bodies and glazes. Binns accompanied the Royal Worcester exhibit of 1,400 pieces to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and made the United States his home in 1897. 

Binns's ceramic technique focused on his pots as utilitarian objects. His work included vases, urns, and bowls. He threw each piece in three forms on a wheel, turning them on a lathe and piecing them together afterwards. One of the concepts Binns taught was “dead ground,” in which the parts of making pottery that couldn’t be precisely controlled, such as firing temperature or glaze calculations, were mitigated by control over glaze placement.

In 1899, Binns helped found the American Ceramics Society. His role in this organization led to the directorship of the newly formed ceramics department of Alfred University, the first United States college to combine programs in ceramic art and science. In the years that followed, Binns shared once-secret clay recipes and glaze formulas with his students, including Arthur Eugene Baggs, William Victor Bragdon, R. Guy Cowan, Maija Grotell and Elizabeth Overbeck, who were largely responsible for fostering the idea of the artist-potter in America.  

Binns is commonly referred to as the "father of American studio ceramics." This title reflects not only his creation of unique stoneware pots in the Arts & Crafts style, but additionally acknowledges his accomplishment of bringing vital information about ceramic clay bodies and glaze recipes to ordinary people, thus laying the foundation of the flourishing studio ceramics movement in the United States that began in the early 1900's.

In 1900, New York Governor Teddy Roosevelt signed a bill establishing the New York State School of Clay-Working and Ceramics—now the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Appointed as the founding director at that time, Binns held the position for over 30 years until his retirement in 1931, during which time he became known for his classic pots with rich monochrome glazes.

Before Binns' arrival at Alfred University, it was customary for one

person to throw art pottery on the wheel and another person to glaze or decorate surfaces mar reflected his respect for the natural materials he used. He admired Oriental forms and glazes. and sometimes signed his pieces by putting his initials, “CFB" inside a circle closely resembling Chinese marks. His signed pieces ;following Asian tradition, Include his initials along with the year in which he made them.

Binns' work was widely exhibited during his lifetime, including his earliest documented stoneware vase, signed and dated 1905, and his final creation, a fragile bisque vase that he

signed and dated 1934, which he left unglazed and unfired at the time of his death. A memorial exhibition Of Binns’ works drew admiring crowds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1935.

American studio ceramics really began with Charles Fergus Binns, who introduced the principles of chemistry and materials science into the ceramic arts. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the Retro style in the Fall 2020 Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

A One-Armed Chair

QUESTION: We bought an old farmhouse three years ago and this chair has been in our barn. What can you tell me about it?

ANSWER: What you have is a one-arm ladies chair made in the Eastlake style from 1870-1885. And, yes, it was part of a parlor set, which usually included a love seat, a two-armed gentleman's chair, and a one-armed ladies' chair. Furniture manufacturers made these chairs with one arm and low to the ground because the ladies of the time wore dresses with lots of fabric in their skirts, covering over one or more petticoats. Eastlake suggested that chairs be made low to the floor so that ladies could remove their shoes without having to bend over in an un-lady-like manner. The new middle class housewives loved it.

The Eastlake style grew out of the beginning of the Aesthetic Movement which later evolved into the Arts and Crafts Movement. Charles Lock Eastlake, himself, wasn't a furniture maker but wrote a book, Hints on Household Taste, published in England in 1868 and the United States in 1872, which called for the manufacture of simple sturdy furniture and gave suggestions on how to decorate a home in a simple, refined manner. He was a noted, trend-setting British architect, author, and lecturer, and by the time his book hit booksellers in America, it was an instant hit with middle-class housewives who wanted to keep up with the trends in home decoration.

Although Eastlake furniture is technically considered Victorian, it breaks away from the excessive high relief carving, classical elements, and numerous curves of other styles produced during this time. Eastlake’s reformed style offered the first glimpses of modernism and was on exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.

In contrast with other Victorian styles of furniture produced in America featuring classical motifs, Eastlake furniture was more geometric and incorporates softer curves. Though some pieces may have incorporated Renaissance Revival and medieval influences, they don’t overwhelm the pices.

A number of manufacturers made this furniture and most didn’t mark their pieces. Using oak, cherry, rosewood, and walnut, they often emphasized wood grains. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell what type of wood manufacturers used because of the dark varnishes they used to coat the surface.

In contrast to Arts and Crafts furniture, Eastlake pieces weren’t completely lacking in ornamentation and decorative elements. But the ornamental carving on these pieces was lightly incised rather than deeply carved. Generally, new Eastlake furniture came in a broad range of quality and price levels.

Electric Lamps for Everyone

QUESTION: Several years ago, I bought an early electric glass lamp at a flea market. Although it was filthy and needed lots of TLC, I decided that I just couldn’t live without it. After giving it a thorough cleaning and having it rewired, I noticed how much it looked like the Tiffany lamps of the early 1900s. Upon further inspection, I noticed E M & Co. impressed into the base. So far, I’ve been unable to discover who E M & Co. is? Can you tell me who made my lamp and a little about it.

ANSWER: You’re the proud owner of a beautiful silhouette lamp—called that because of the silhouettes created by the shade when the lamp is on—made by the Edward Miller & Company of Meriden, Connecticut.

Unfortunately, when people think of metal and glass lamps of the early 20th century, they usually associate all lamps with Louis Comfort Tiffany. Then their eyes light up with dollar signs. But most of the lamps from this period were not made by Tiffany.

When Tiffany first began making his lamps, they were expensive to make and expensive to buy. Prices for them ran into the hundreds of dollars. Slag glass panel lamps, as they're known  today, had a few large pieces of glass fitted into a cast metal frame that simulated the effects of the more expensive leaded glass lamps. That made them affordable for the average person. A 1925 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog offers metal table lamps fitted with "art glass" priced from $6.90 to $19.

Many companies made this type of lamp. Often the lamps weren’t signed, but if the makers did mark them, they usually cast their mark into the metal on the bottom of the base. Sometimes they placed a mark on the metal edge of a shade or elsewhere on the base. Some lamps had paper labels, but most of them are long gone. Edward Miller & Company was one of many lamp makers.

The Miller Company began in 1844 in Meriden, Connecticut, as Joel Miller and Son. Originally, the company produced metal candle-holders, then moved on to kerosene lamps, gas lighting, and electric lighting. The name of the company changed, also, becoming Edward Miller & Company, then The Miller Company, both under the mark E M & CO on their lamp bases.

Although Miller produced expensive leaded glass lamps, the company took advantage of the opportunity to sell lighting to the middle classes as more homes became wired for electricity. The company sold lamps in bulk to utility companies in large cities who retailed them to their customers. A 1920 Philadelphia Electric Company catalog shows lamps with prices from $12.50 to $60, depending on size.

Miller took advantage of the latest discovery in lighting—electricity. Up to the last decade of the 19th century, everyone owned and used either gas or kerosene lamps. But the light they gave off was dim. The discovery of electricity led to lamps that glowed brighter in a downward direction, thus offering improved lighting for reading and sewing.

Though electrical lamps offered lots of advantages, there were problems with the carbon filaments in early incandescent light bulbs that didn't last long. The bulbs turned dark inside from carbon, and they used a lot of electricity per watt of light. The invention of the tungsten filament bulb and improvements to it made between 1906 and 1910 established electric lamps as a practical and reliable alternative to gas and kerosene.

These early electric lamps offered a variety of base and shade overlay designs, influenced by several style movements including Art Nouveau with its intricate curvy lines and botanical themes, Arts and Crafts with its simpler forms and straighter lines, and Orientalism with its Middle Eastern flavor. And with the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922 , people’s interest in everything Egyptian grew.

Lamp creators took their inspiration from all of these influences, giving consumers a choice of floral designs, geometric patterns, or scenes with camels, palm trees and pyramids. Other designs reflected Neo-Classical Revival architectural and furniture styles, employing fluted columns, garlands, and urns as design elements.

Manufacturers produced slag glass lamps with amber glass, as well as other colors. Amber was the dominant color because it proved to be the most restful for reading. These lamps often have more than one color of glass. Makers sometimes used various colors of slag glass to simulate sunsets or water behind their metal frames.

Today, these same slag lamps sell for $500 to $1.500, depending on style, size, and especially condition. Smaller varieties, known as boudoir lamps, sell for less while larger ones sell for more.

With the onset of the Great Depression, the market for more expensive dramatic, heavy lamps with glass shades faded and manufacturers responded with cheaper, lightweight lamps with paper or fabric shades.

The Other Arts and Crafts Designer

QUESTION: I have a Mission chair that has been in my family for decades. I never paid much attention to it. But recently when I was cleaning it, I turned it over and noticed a label under the arm of the chair which reads, "Limberts Arts and Crafts Furniture/Trademark/Made in Grand Rapids and Holland.” I know that Grand Rapids is in Michigan, but did this company also make furniture in the Netherlands? And just who is Limbert?

ANSWER: Charles Limbert made what you call “Mission” furniture in Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan. In fact, his furniture wasn’t constructed in the Mission Oak style, which actually was a style of Arts and Crafts furniture that developed just before the turn-of-the-20th century.  This wasn’t as much of a style as what manufacturers called furniture made of oak that featured simple horizontal and vertical lines and flat panels that accentuate the grain of the wood. It was supposed to emulate furniture of the Spanish missions in California and Texas. What Charles Limbert made was furniture in the pure Arts and Crafts style.

The Arts and Crafts Movement in America originated in mid-19th-century England where the teachings of John Ruskin and William Morris popularized social reform. The movement began as a revolt against the Industrial Revolution and the dehumanization of the workers being replaced by machines. Americans learned about this movement through Gustav Stickley's magazine The Craftsman. Hand craftsmanship and a return to simplicity became hallmarks of the movement. These ideals applied not only to the lifestyle of the follower, but also to furniture and accessories in the home.

Hailed as the beginning of Modernism in the United States, Arts and Crafts interiors were in direct contrast to the preceding Victorian period of ornate decorative arts. Rectilinear forms of quartersawn oak replaced ornately carved rosewood and mahogany Victorian furniture. Mortise and tenon joints, butterfly keys, and the grain of the wood, itself, became the ornamentation on Arts and Crafts pieces.

While Gustav Stickley is best known as the leader of Arts and Crafts Movement in America, other designers also achieved recognition for their contribution to Arts and Crafts design. One of them was Charles Limbert. His company produced high quality Arts and Crafts furniture, but didn’t attempt to influence consumers about the idealized harmony of the Arts and Crafts lifestyle.

In the early 1880s, Charles Linbert began his furniture manufacturing career at the John A. Colby and Co.. in Chicago. He learned all sides of the furniture business— design, production, and marketing. An 1889 partnership with Philip Klingman established the Limbert and Klingman Chair in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Limbert and Klingman manufactured period reproduction chairs for only two years. In 1894, Limbert formed the C.P. Limbert and Company to produce Arts and Crafts furniture.

By 1906, the company had grown and moved to Holland, Michigan. Limbert called his line of furniture "Holland Dutch Arts and Crafts," most likely in reference to the local Dutch population.

Limbert's early furniture shows influences ranging from Japanese to Gothic. Some of his early china cabinets and bookcases have doors with stained glass in an Art Nouveau style.

His peak of design achievement came during 1904 to 1906 when he introduced many of his cut-out designs. Many of his de-signs were internationally inspired by the Vienna Secessionist School and designers such as Scotsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Austrian Josef Hoffmann. Limbert employed designers such as Hungarian architect Paul Horti and father and son Austrian designers, Louis and William J. Gohlke.

Limbert promoted his furniture as being "essentially the result of hand labor, with machinery being used where it can be employed to the advantage of the finished article." Like Stickley, he didn’t let machinery control production and emphasized the contribution of skilled craftsmen in his furniture promotions.

He constructed his furniture of quartersawn white oak, with well-executed doweled joints, keyed tenons and splined tabletops. Long, tapering corbels under arms characterize Limbert chairs. Unfortunately, Limbert didn’t extend his wood working quality to the hardware used on his pieces, most of which came from the Grand Rapids Brass Company.

Compared with Stickley's work, Limbert's designs were typically less severe and more visually interesting, usually achieved through the use of cut-outs and other elements inspired by the as English Arts and Crafts Movement and Dutch folk furniture.

His pieces were among the original furnishings of the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park. Today, several wash stands remain in the Old House section of the Inn.

The Quest for Artistic Furniture

QUESTION:  I inherited this chair from my mom but have no information on it. The only markings on the chair are “AT2-232” written with a marker on the bottom of the seat and “678” stamped into the wood on the bottom of the seat. Can you provide any information on the chair?

ANSWER: Your chair is made in the Art Nouveau style. It would have been a dining or desk chair in its day since it doesn’t have a padded seat. The number 678 on the bottom is probably the manufacturer’s model number. Many pieces of Art Nouveau furniture were mass-produced even though your chair looks as if it was handmade.

Art Nouveau or Jugendstil is an international philosophy and style of art and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that was popular from about 1890 to 1910. Art nouveau literally means "new art" in French.

Those two names came Gallerie Maison de l'Art Nouveau in Paris and the magazine Jugend in Munich, both of which popularized the style. Maison de l'Art Nouveau, or the House of New Art, was the name of the gallery opened in 1895 by German art dealer Siegfried Bing that featured exclusively modern art. In 1900, Bing produced an exhibition of color-coordinated modern furniture, tapestries, and objets d’art at the Exposition Universelle. Because his decorative displays became so strongly associated with this style, the style, itself, took on the name of his gallery, "Art Nouveau."

Inspired by natural forms, such as flowers and plants, Art Nouveau was a reaction to academic art of the 19th century and artists used lots of curved lines in their designs.

Though the Art Nouveau movement was innovative, it didn’t last long. It was important in American furniture history, however, because it heralded the end of the dismal darkness that was the close of the Victorian era. Rebelling against the overembellished furniture that flooded the furniture marketplace of the late 1890s, some European designers developed new ideas that found immediate approval with wealthy collectors. They began designing furniture and accessories with simple, flowing, fluid lines, taking their cues from nature, with its motion, curves, and endless cycling. Fairylike tendrils wove in, out, and around the leaves and stems of flowers, fruit, and nuts. The entire effect was one of delicate sensuality and naturalness, with faint overtones of sentimental decadence.

The Art Nouveau years found their greatest expression in accessories, not furniture. This was the era that fostered the whirlwind careers of Louis Comfort Tiffany and others who worked in glass, china, pottery, and metal. Those substances were far easier to shape into the undulating styles of the time than was wood. Most wooden furniture during this period was custom-made and therefore usually of good quality and fine woods, featuring asymmetrical lines, as well as stylized animal and plant forms.

Art Nouveau is a "total" art style, embracing architecture, graphic art, interior design, and most of the decorative arts including jewelery, furniture, textiles, household silver and other utensils and lighting, as well as the fine arts. Artists desired to combine the fine arts and applied arts, even for utilitarian objects, such as tableware, cigarette cases, and silverware. Art historians consider it an important transition between the eclectic historic revival styles of the 19th-century and Modernism.

Three international art exhibitions—the Barcelona Universal Exposition of 1888, the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, and the Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Decorativa Moderna of 1902 in Turin, Italy— showcased an overview of this modern style in every medium.

Like most design styles, Art Nouveau sought to harmonize and modernize forms of the Rococo style, such as flame and shell textures. Artists and designers also advocated the use of stylized organic forms as a source of inspiration, and expanded their use of natural forms with seaweed, grasses, and insects.

But unlike the craftsman-oriented Arts and Crafts Movement, the artists of the Art Nouveau Movement  used new materials, machined surfaces, and abstraction in their designs. The stylized nature of Art Nouveau design made it expensive to produce, therefore, only the wealthy could afford it. Unlike furniture handmade by the craftsmen of the Arts and Crafts Movement, that of the Art Nouveau Movement was produced in factories by normal manufacturing techniques. Finishes were highly polished or varnished, and designs in general were usually complex, with curving shapes.

Several notable designers of Art Nouveau furniture were also architects who designed furniture for specific buildings they had also designed, a way of working inherited from the Arts and Crafts Movement. One such designer is Antoni Gaudí, who produced many notable buildings in and around Barcelona, Spain.

Woven Beauty

QUESTION: I recently purchased a wicker table at an antique show. It doesn’t have any markings and the dealer who sold it to me couldn’t tell me much about it. I love this piece and it now occupies a prominent place in my den. Can you tell me anything about it? And can you also tell me a bit about the origins of wicker in general.

ANSWER: Wicker has been around for quite a while, but your table originated during the peak of its popularity. Back then, the ornateness of wicker brought an element of taste to middle-class American homes.

Back in the 17th century, the Dutch made wicker and brought it to England before sailing across the Atlantic to the New World. For the next several centuries objects made of wicker imported from Europe decorated American homes.

Until the 1850s, furnishings were inexpensive and serviceable, therefore easily disregarded. Then through a changing cultural, economic, and social conditions, wicker became a status symbol for America's rising middle class.

Although the mass production of wicker began in America, the main materials used in its manufacture—cane and reed—came from rattan palms, which grew wild in Asia. In the early 1840s, Cyrus Wakefield, a shrewd young Yankee grocer, noticed huge quantities of rattan being discarded around the Boston docks after serving as packing material to protect cargo on clipper ships returning from Asia. Discovering that chairs and tables could be made more cheaply from this strange material than importing finished pieces, he began making small pieces of furniture using this discarded rattan.

In 1873 he founded the Wakefield Rattan Company in Wakefield, Massachusetts. By the end of the decade, his firm accumulated sales of over $2 million. At its peak, his  company employed 1,000 workers in 30 buildings in Wakefield and another 800 in  Chicago.

Wakefield's successes encouraged Heywood and Brothers Company, wooden chair makers in Gardner, Massachusetts, to begin making wicker furniture in 1876. For the next 20 years, the two companies competed fiercely and dominated the industry.

Both companies responded to economic prosperity following the Civil War which enabled middle class families to leave America’s dirty, crowded cities for clean, airy suburbs, prompting a demand for wicker furnishings. These light, airy pieces were ideal for the new gabled and turreted Queen Anne-style homes and for the verandas of resort hotels catering to the new vacationing middle classes.

Because it was easy to keep clean, wicker attracted those concerned about sanitation, and its lightness, adaptability and design potential, Victorian tastemakers loved it. Wicker not only satisfied those with good taste but did it at an affordable price.

When the Aesthetic Movement swept America in the 1870s, stressing the uplifting moral and spiritual influence of artistic decors, tastemakers recommended the use of ornamental wicker in people’s homes. This emerging middle-class interest in aesthetically correct furniture encouraged Wakefield and other manufacturers to create increasingly ornate pieces that people associated with art and beauty. Fancy wicker enhanced the ostentatiously overdecorated Victorian parlors and expansive porches while proclaiming the taste of its owners.

Curling, shaping and twisting pliable lengths of wetted reed into whimsical scrolls, spirals, and whirlygigs, skilled craftsmen fed the Victorian fever for more exotic wicker objects. They incorporated a variety of astronomical and botanical forms, flags, Oriental fans, shells, and ships into their elaborate designs. Two of the most unique pieces was the tete-a-tete, in which two people could sit side by side or the serpentine "Conversation Chair,"  in which a courting couple could sit facing each other.

Elegant tables were important to the decor of Victorian homes. With its intricate grid of legs and embellishments, fancy skirt and caned top, a square table would have added grace and utility to its owner's room.

The growing demand for more elaborate forms reached its peak during the 1890s, when American wicker became more fanciful and ostentatious. A good example is the "Fancy Reception Chair,” featuring intricate tiny scrolls and frilly curlicues. Often designed as show pieces for elegant parlors rather than for actual use, these ornate chairs are fairly hard to find today and often sell for upwards of $1,000 in good condition.

By the turn of the 20th century, Victorian ornate design faded in favor of simplicity. Design reformers instead promoted the "Bar Harbor" style, simplified wicker furnishings with wide open, diagonal latticework that would fit plain, open interiors.

Just before World War I, the Arts and 'Crafts movement inspired American wicker   manufacturers to create boxy, unornamented shapes ideal for the minimalist interiors of bungalow homes. Arts and Crafts leader Gustav Stickley produced a line of square and severe willow furniture using geometric designs. However, by the  beginning of the Great Depression, wicker was all but dead in America.

A Taste for Eastlake

QUESTION: I recently discovered two chairs and a settee at my grandmother’s house. Unfortunately, there are no markings of any kind as she apparently planned to refinish them and sanded everything off! What can you tell me about them? After hours and hours of searching on Google, the best I could come up with is that they're possibly Victorian.

ANSWER: You’re half way there as far as your chairs and settee are concerned. Yes, they are Victorian—Eastlake Victorian, as a matter of fact. This style was popular from 1870 to 1885 and is one of seven different furniture styles popular during the Victorian Age.

Charles Locke Eastlake, an English critic of taste, did more to affect a change in American taste in the late 19th Century than anyone before or since. More than any other individual, he was responsible for introducing the principles of the English design reform movement to the American public.

Eastlake considered simplicity the key to beauty. He thought the objects in people's homes should be attractive and well made by workers who took pride in their work. He published a book, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details, a runaway bestseller from 1870 and 1890. The book became the decorating bible for upper middle class American housewives.

Though Eastlake included some of his own sketches among the illustrations of well-designed furniture chosen for his book, he was primarily a critic of taste, not a furniture designer. The furniture illustrated in Hints had ornamental features including shallow carving, marquetry, incised or pierced geometric designs, rows of turned spindles, chamfered edges, brass strap hinges, bail handles, and keyhole hardware inspired by Gothic forms. Every decorative device, according to Eastlake, also had to fulfill a useful function.

To relieve the simplicity of rectilinear forms, Eastlake advised using turned legs or spindle supports. When a homeowner desired an "effect of richness,” he suggested restrained, conventionalized carving, inlay, and sometimes even veneer. Ornament, he felt, should be stylized rather than naturalistic, for it’s "this difference between artistic abstraction and pseudo-realism which separates good and noble design from that which is commonplace and bad." A functionalist, Eastlake cautioned that carved decoration should always be shallow and never "inconveniently" located, as were the "knotted lumps" of grapes or roses decorating rococo-revival chairs that often stabbed the sitter between his or her shoulder blades. His book further suggested that furniture be made of such solid, strongly grained woods as oak, walnut, or mahogany. He preferred oil-rubbed finishes to "French-polished" ones, and varnish was taboo.

By 1876, homeowners of the nation's most elegant homes decorated them in subdued "artistic" tones, set off by rectilinear furniture of rich bird's eye maple or elegantly ebonized cherry wood. Critics broadly categorized the new designs as "art furniture," but also called them "modern Gothic," "Queen Anne Revival," or "Eastlake" in honor of the man who brought a sense of taste to America.

To the modern eye, such furniture with its intricately stylized marquetry, gilded incised designs, spindled galleries, inset tiles, richly grained woods, and decorative turned elements hardly seems "simple." But in contrast to the heavily carved furniture of preceding decades, embellished with naturalistic roses and bunches of grapes imposed on the elaborate rococo shapes that we now regard as the embodiment of Victorian design, Eastlake-inspired furniture was remarkably functional and clean-lined.

The Eastlake style was quickly taken up by the manufacturers of cheaper furniture, who until then had given very little attention to artistic form. The furniture produced in these factories ranged from excellent to shoddy, depending on the grade of lumber used, how well it was seasoned in the drying kilns appended to the larger factories, and upon the skill of each machine operator throughout the manufacturing process. At its worst, factory furniture was poorly designed and rickety. However, there was a middle range of
moderately priced but well-constructed factory furniture produced in the Midwest for wholesale shipment to Eastern retail outlets. These chairs and settee fit into this group.

Eastlake-style furniture often featured tables and chests with marble tops, some the traditional white, others in rich Italian pinks and browns. Tables and chairs had aprons and legs incised with horizontal or vertical lines called reeding and chamfered corners. Round legs on chairs also featured ring-like annulets. Quatrefoils were another popular addition, since flat cutouts often graced the more elegant pieces. Lastly, acanthus-leaf designs could be found incised into even the cheapest versions.

Pieces of furniture in this style had low relief carvings, moldings, incised lines, geometric ornaments, and flat surfaces that were easy to keep clean. Also called Cottage Furniture, the mass-produced pieces were much more affordable than the fancy revival pieces. Unfortunately, while Eastlake-style furniture may have looked refined, most chairs and sofas weren’t very comfortable and were meant to be used in formal parlors for guests only.