by Jessica Todd Smith

A hundred and one years ago, craftsmen at an arts colony in upstate New York assembled a simple, boxy cabinet out of poplar wood. Standing about six feet tall, four feet wide, and slightly less than two feet deep, it remains a handsome piece today, with muted green stain and a carved door panel depicting the large, magnolia-like flowers of the Liriodendron tulipifera—also known as the yellow poplar or tulip poplar that grows throughout the eastern United States.

While eye-catching, the panel’s modest surface decoration belies the complex and rich story that can be found beneath the surface. The tulip poplar cabinet—recently acquired by The Huntington—can trace its lineage to the 19th-century British Arts and Crafts movement while simultaneously invoking its authenticity as a fine specimen of early-20th-century American furniture making. The cabinet’s progenitor was British expatriate Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, whose lofty aspirations to establish an arts colony in the United States culminated in the founding of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1902. Although he set out to finance the colony by manufacturing and selling furniture, he closed his shop after only two years of operation. Nonetheless, the colony survived in varying forms for many years and still exists today as an artists’ retreat. Its furniture endures as a particularly eloquent testimony to the early intermingling of the British and American art and design reform movements.

The founding of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony marked the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Born into a wealthy textile-manufacturing family in 1854 in Yorkshire, England, Whitehead realized early in life that his aspirations were not suited for industry. In 1873 he entered Oxford.

Emboldened by his study of the social and artistic philosophies of John Ruskin, he set out to master the principles that underlay the widespread movement to reinvigorate the design and manufacture of goods for everyday use in people’s homes. Ruskin, too, had been born into wealth but devoted energy and money to the Guild of St. George, a utopian community in Sheffield that attempted to combine artistic principles with notions of morality and craftsmanship. He railed against the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, perhaps validating Whitehead’s decision to abandon his family’s business. Ruskin’s influence had also been strong in the career of William Morris, who took Ruskin’s attack on unrestrained laissez-faire economics a step further by espousing revolutionary socialism. Ruskin himself did not adopt strict socialist principles, but he strived to use his wealth to elevate the stature of manual labor. Ruskin’s political views may have been more palatable to Whitehead, who nonetheless regarded himself as equally a disciple of Morris, at least in terms of the design of objects. The exhortations of both Ruskin and Morris to observe nature closely and to use materials honestly thus formed the basis of Whitehead’s approach to art and life.

By 1894, Whitehead had settled in Montecito, Calif., with his second wife, Jane Byrd McCall, whom he had married two years earlier. Raised in a distinguished Philadelphia family, McCall spent much of her early life traveling between the United States and Europe. She and Whitehead met in Italy and quickly discovered common interests, both having studied under Ruskin in England. After they married, they continued to travel for a couple of years, eventually deciding to leave Europe for America. Their Montecito home, known as Arcady, became the center of an informal artistic community, attracting local musicians, writers, and painters.

Although an idyllic locale, the Whiteheads’ rustic oasis still fell short of utopia. The couple shared the dream of creating a community of men and women who could create arts and crafts in a healthful, beautiful setting. Whitehead set out to find the ideal location. Accompanied by writer Hervey White and artist Bolton Brown in 1902, he explored sites in Virginia and North Carolina before ending up in Woodstock. Whitehead’s companions were committed exponents of the Arts and Crafts ideology. White had studied at Harvard University with Charles Eliot Norton, a close friend of John Ruskin and the first president of Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts. Brown had established the department of drawing and painting at Stanford University. Together with Whitehead, White and Brown imagined an Arts and Crafts collective that would take root among the poplars, chestnuts, maples, and oaks near a farming community in the Catskill Mountains.

Whitehead was thrilled with the setting. Writing home, he described the bucolic landscape within five hours of New York City. Indeed, Whitehead knew that a manufacturing operation would need to be in close proximity to its market. He would later use the convenient train service to transport furniture to McCreery’s, a retailer that also sold pieces by Gustav Stickley’s firm United Crafts and by Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters. But more important to Whitehead’s grand design, artists would thrive surrounded by nature. He purchased nearly 1,200 acres cobbled together from seven adjacent farms and oversaw the construction of the first five of some 30 buildings that would eventually occupy the principal site at the edge of woods. Faithful to Ruskinian design principles, the rural buildings took shape amid frameworks of exposed oak and chestnut. They included a metalworking shop, a pottery studio, a woodworking shop, a large studio for art classes, a library, a guesthouse called the Villetta Inn, and his own home—White Pines. Whitehead began assembling a team of artists and craftsmen that would make furniture and other crafts for generations to come.

Or so he hoped.

Ralph and Jane named the colony Byrdcliffe, a combination of Jane’s middle name and the second half of Ralph’s middle name. The design of things made at Byrdcliffe also would represent a melding of British and American aesthetic principles. Indeed, the tulip poplar cabinet and other furniture produced at the colony possess a peculiarly “pure,” early Morris-inspired style. They tend to be boxy and rectilinear, with simple lines forming frames for carvings or paintings in the manner that Morris and his cohort promoted for the furnishings of Red House, Morris’ home outside London in the 1850s. Yet at the same time the cabinet doesn’t adhere to the structural principles of Morris’ “architectural” furniture. For example, the drawer is held together by glue and nails rather than by interlocking elements that could be easily disassembled. Cabinets manufactured by such well-known companies as Craftsman, the Roycrofters, and Rose Valley are all, in this respect, much closer to the classic Arts and Crafts practice. As Byrdcliffe expert Robert Edwards has observed, the working drawings for the furniture came with few instructions—the quality of construction seems to have been, relatively speaking, a matter of indifference.

Whitehead thus differed from his British mentors in a significant way. While other British disciples of Ruskin and Morris sought to place craft and fine art on the same level, thus elevating the importance of the craftsman, Whitehead—like Morris himself—did not actually give credit to the people building the furniture. Authorship went to the artist who designed the carving or painting that adorned the piece. Perhaps as a result, the decoration of Byrdcliffe furniture seems to have been treated with more care than the construction of the forms.

A number of different artists contributed to the ornament of the furniture. Edna Walker was one of the colony’s principal designers. Along with Zulma Steele, another prominent Byrdcliffe artist, she studied under the renowned art teacher Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute, a progressive art school in Brooklyn. In keeping with the tenets of Ruskin, Walker made nature studies depicting indigenous flora and plant motifs, such as the tulip poplar, which she adapted as decorations for various forms of Byrdcliffe furniture.

Furniture production was a collaborative process. A floral study would be made into a full-size rendering of the design and transferred onto the wooden panels. The panels were carved, sometimes painted, and the surrounding panels were stained. No other filler, sealer, or finish was typically applied. The wood grain showed through, making it a part of the decorative scheme. Because pieces could be made to order, many are unique. The Huntington’s tulip poplar cabinet is one of only two known examples of the design.

Remarkably, Byrdcliffe’s furniture enterprise folded after two years of production. The furniture was expensive to make and to ship, but that was only one of several factors that contributed to the decision to halt production. Whitehead did not oppose the use of machinery and, in fact, provided equipment for his workshops. However, more industrialized shops at companies such as United Crafts and Roycrofters succeeded in producing uniform products in larger quantities. Other companies had more success with marketing and discovered loyal and wealthy local clientele. The firm of Greene and Greene, founded by brothers Charles and Henry Greene, represented the high end of Arts and Crafts production, offering architecture and interior design for the California homes of wealthy clients. Byrdcliffe furniture was less expensive than that of Greene and Greene, though more costly than average mass-produced wares or items created by more entrepreneurial outfits. As such, it fell into something of a gap in the market.

The enterprise also may have been affected by its deciduous workforce. Every winter, Ralph and Jane packed up and went back to California, while most artists and craftsmen on the property retreated to less rustic environs. Such a seasonal interruption might have its purpose in nature, but it wreaked havoc on a business. The making of furniture at Byrdcliffe ceased in 1905.

In fact, Whitehead had never expressed any great interest in actually selling his furniture. Watercolors—like the one of the tulip poplar cabinet by Walker—were his only promotional tools. They proved much less effective than the commercial catalogs and magazines used, for example, by Stickley. Aside from these drawings, no other advertising for Byrdcliffe furniture is known. The wealthy Whitehead was able to support the community without the added revenue he had hoped the sale of Byrdcliffe furniture would bring.

Examples of furniture created at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony are quite rare. Only 50 pieces are known to exist. A fortuitous result of Whitehead’s failings as a businessman is the pristine condition of the tulip poplar cabinet. The piece never sold and remained at White Pines until it was inherited in 1983 by the heirs to the estate. The Huntington acquired the cabinet and Walker’s watercolor directly from the family in 2004. Thanks to a long period of benign neglect, the cabinet never fell victim to refinishing. It bears the signs of surface oxidation associated with the natural aging process of furniture.

Ralph Whitehead’s production of furniture was a short-lived experiment. The drawings of the tulip poplar cabinet and all other Byrdcliffe pieces date from 1903 to 1905, but all signed furniture bears the date 1904. Yet the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony continues to exist as a retreat and school for artists, and surviving examples of furniture like the tulip poplar cabinet continue to produce layers of meaning that transcend one moment in time.

Jessica Todd Smith is the Virginia Steele Scott Curator of American Art at The Huntington.