Candace Wheeler: The Art And Enterprise Of American Design, 1875-1900

Carol Irish & Amelia Peck

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Review

As in many areas of my life, not just in matters literary, I was first drawn to this book by its beautiful cover and later caught up with the exhibition which it celebrates at The Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Candace Wheeler, a name new to me, was a designer of interiors and more especially, of fabrics, who at the end of the 19th Century transformed the tradition of American textiles and was the driving force behind the process whereby women became involved in the design field.

Her busy life spanned nearly a full century (1827-1923) of astonishing transformation.  She herself compared her early years on her father’s farm to “life in Puritan times”.  She died in jazz-age New York.

Inspired initially by the talents of William Morris and Walter Crane, she also embraced the influence of Japan, incorporating natural forms to produce furnishing fabrics of outstanding beauty which in their simplicity and sophistication put her English mentors to shame.

She founded The Society Of Decorative Arts in New York, which offered instruction in the applied arts to women and helped them sell their wares.  She went on to work with Louis Comfort Tiffany, and eventually in 1883 she established her own firm, Associated Artists, producing both hand-wrought and machine made textiles, staffed entirely by women and whose clientèle encompassed Astors, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Mark Twain.

The figure which emerges from these ethereal folds is a sturdy, practical woman, high-minded to be sure, but one of great charm too.

I was fascinated by her. - review by Stewart Grimshaw