Lot 5

Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead, circa 1905. Photo courtesy of a private collection. "White Pines", the Whiteheads' home at Byrdcliffe, circa 1905. Photo courtesy of a private collection. The woodworking shop at Byrdcliffe, circa 1904. Photo courtesy of a private collection. Lot 5, the Brydcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony chest offered here is a unique expression of the Arts & Crafts movement aesthetic as realized by Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead, a founder with his wife Jane Byrd McCall of the Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony, established near Woodstock, New York in 1902. Whitehead, an ardent disciple of John Ruskin, admired the Arts & Crafts movement ideals of living the simple life and working close to nature. At Byrdcliffe, he created and bankrolled a pastoral environment in which art and craftsmanship could be integrated with daily living. The woodworking shops began operating in 1903 and produced no more than 50 pieces of furniture before closing in 1905. The first flight of artists who came to work and teach at Byrdcliffe included the painters Herman Dudley Murphy, Dawson Dawson Watson, Birge Harrison, Bolton Brown, Zulma Steele and Edna Walker. All except Harrison are known to have contributed designs for the decorations of furniture made at the colony. This chest of drawers is one of four oak cabinets of this shape known. Each of these cabinets has inset panels with different styles of decoration. Two have maple leaves designed by Steele: one colored with transparent stains, the other left bare. A third has paintings of a stark tree and moon. This cabinet has blue nocturnes like so many paintings in fashion after James McNeill Whistler popularized the genre late in the 19th century. In 1899, Arthur Wesley Dow furthered the craze in America with the publication of Composition. The landscape panels, depicting earth, water and sky illuminated by a full moon, have a transcendent beauty achieved in part through the careful balance of composition, line, and tonalities of color, basic elements of Dow's design philosophy. The painter of these panels is not documented, but the style very closely resembles easel paintings of Dawson Dawson Watson. Whitehead himself is thought to have designed the cabinet. Because little effort was made to market the furniture, most of the pieces, including this cabinet, became a part of the Whitehead estate. They remained at the Whitehead home "White Pines" until 1983 when they were removed for an exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum. PROPERTY FROM THE HEIRS OF PETER WHITEHEAD

AN IMPORTANT OAK CHEST OF DRAWERS WITH PAINTED PANELS

THE BYRDCLIFFE ARTS & CRAFTS COLONY, 1904

Details

AN IMPORTANT OAK CHEST OF DRAWERS WITH PAINTED PANELS
The Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony, 1904
60in. (152.4cm.) high, 57in. (144.7cm.) wide, 23¾in. (60.3cm.) deep
branded BYRDCLIFFE 1904 with the firm's mark

Provenance

Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead and Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead
Peter Whitehead, son
By descent in the family

Literature

Robert Edwards, "The Utopias of Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead" in The Magazine Antiques, 127:1 (January 1985), p. 262, pl. III for an illustration of this cabinet. See pp. 260-276 for a full discussion about Whitehead's career.

The American Federation of the Arts, Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts (exh. cat.), 1999, p. 185 for an illustration of this cabinet.

Exhibited

Wilmington, Delaware, Delaware Art Museum, The Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony: Life by Design, November 9, 1984-January 6, 1985. This exhibit traveled to Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, The Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, January 15-March 31, 1985.

Stanford, California, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts, July 13-September 19, 1999. This exhibit traveled to Chicago, Illinois, Terra Museum of American Art, October 8, 1999-January 2, 2000 and to Fort Dodge, Iowa, Blanden Memorial Art Museum, July 7-October 1, 2000.

Lot Essay

cf. Wendy Kaplan, "The Art That is Life": The Arts & Crafts Movement, 1875-1920, 1987, pl. 34 for a related Byrdcliffe cabinet in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and pp. 223-236 and pp. 313-314 for further discussion of the colony.

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