- Stickley, Gustav
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died April 21, 1942, Syracuse, N.Y.U.S. furniture designer and maker.He learned to make furniture at a chair factory owned by an uncle. After taking over the factory, he moved it to New York state, first to Binghamton and then to Syracuse. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement and by visits to old missions in the American Southwest, he introduced с 1900 a highly original line of sturdy oak furniture. To spread his ideas and designs, he published the influential magazine The Craftsman (1901–16). In 1916 two younger brothers established a firm to produce furniture from his designs and gave the style the name Mission, by which name it is still popular today.
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▪ American designerborn March 9, 1858, Osceola, Wis., U.S.died April 21, 1942, Syracuse, N.Y.American furniture designer and maker who largely created what came to be known as the Mission style.Stickley learned basic furniture-making skills in a Pennsylvania chair factory owned by his uncle. After a time he took over the factory, and in 1884 he moved it to Binghamton, N.Y. He experimented briefly with designs in the fashionable Art Nouveau mode before introducing, about 1900, a new line of sturdy oak furniture whose virtues of simplicity, functionality, and soundness of construction were for Stickley an expression of democratic values. He established the Craftsman Workshops in Syracuse in 1901 and began publishing the monthly magazine The Craftsman to carry his ideas and designs to a wider audience. Although he owed much to the British Arts and Crafts Movement, Stickley was a highly original designer who applied his ideas not only to furniture but to decorative accessories of all kinds. One of the most popular features of The Craftsman was a series of house designs intended to suit modest incomes, an interest of the Arts and Crafts movement, based as it was on Christian socialism.The popularity of Craftsman furniture waned after a decade and a half, and in 1916 Stickley ceased publishing his magazine and gave up his bankrupt workshops to two younger brothers, who continued for a time to produce furniture from his designs. Two other brothers had for some time produced similar furniture under the name L. and J.G. Stickley, and numerous other imitators had capitalized on his work as well.In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there was a resurgence of interest in Stickley's designs and ideas. Not only were some of his furniture catalogs reprinted, but illustrated books of his works and a number of monographs were published.Additional ReadingBiographies include David Cathers, Gustav Stickley (2003); and Mary Ann Smith, Gustav Stickley, the Craftsman (1983, reissued 1992). Other critical works are Joseph J. Bavaro and Thomas L. Mossman, The Furniture of Gustav Stickley: History, Techniques, and Projects (1982, reissued 1996); Barry Sanders, A Complex Fate: Gustav Stickley and the Craftsman Movement (1996); and Mark Alan Hewitt, Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Farms: The Quest for an Arts and Crafts Utopia (2001).* * *
Universalium. 2010.
