American
furniture makers Gustav Stickley (1858-1952) and Elbert Hubbard
(1856-1915) espoused the Arts and Crafts version of the simple
life as an aid to marketing just as they added symbols of Arts and
Crafts construction, like
the use of quartered oak and exposed mortise and tenons, so the consumer could easily identify their products.
Their furniture was exhibited at world's fairs and expositions that were important advertising venues.
It
was featured in the showrooms of retail stores across the United
States. Illustrations of their work salted dozens of magazines and
books about interior decoration.
They were even recognized in design books decades after their style was no longer popular.
In
contrast, [Charles Rohlfs, William L Price at Rose Valley] Byrdcliffe
furniture enjoyed no such fashion. A survey of hundreds of turn-of-
the-century shelter and design periodicals and dozens of books about
domestic design and taste turns up not a single reference to the
furniture of Byrdcliffe.
Yet decades later, as we examine
the Arts and Crafts movement, this ignored group of furniture provides
much important information about decorative arts at the turn of the
century, in particular the melding of the British and American versions
of the Arts and Crafts movement as it happened at Byrdcliffe.
Source: Robert Edwards "Brydcliffe Furniture: Imagination Versus Reality", in Nancy E. Green, ed.,
Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, page 74
