Glossary:-- Spindles/Slats, in the Arts and Crafts Style

This entry is still under construction-- several points need more documentation

Oxford English Dictionary on slats and spindles:-- For slat/slats, see below; for spindle/spindles, the results are, at best, mixed.

Spindles

In the OED, none of the meanings given for "spindle" come close to what woodworkers mean when, today, they speak about spindles in the historic context of Arts and Crafts styles:-- "square". Instead, I turned to the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology

Slat/Slats

4. a. A long narrow strip of wood or metal, used for various purposes.

1764 The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature: Museum rusticum et commerciale or, select papers on agriculture, commerce, arts, and manufactures: drawn from experience and communicated by gentlemen engaged in these pursuits:

"Nailing of slats, old hoops, or laths, on the two sides and fore end of the cart."

1848 Noah Webster, A Dictionary of the English Language :

"The slats of a cart or a chair ... ".

1866 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies:

[Biography of Civil War surgeon Robert Ware], "The bulk of those now in bed must have lain on the slats of the bedstead."

1885 Charles Frederick Holder Marvels of Animal Life:

"Arranged in transverse rows, like slats on a blind".

1890 Holt Samuel Hallett, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States :

"When the floors are of split bamboo, ... the interstices between the slats are many and often large."

Are These the Roots of the Arts and Crafts Spindles?

Square spindles are a product of the table saw. Lathes -- foot lathes -- have been around for centuries, and make producing round spindles easy. The original Morris chair, not by William Morris, but an old carpenter at Hurstmonceaux, Sussex by name Ephraim Colman. Morris & Co Armchair, 1885-90., has round spindles. Frank Lloyd Wright starts out with round spindles; for example the high-back chairs in Wright's own dining room of 1895 had spiral spindles; he replaces them later with square ones.

Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship to the Arts and Crafts Movement, both indigenous and European, is complicated. Just as William Morris and John Ruskin argue for a return to the simplicity of design captured in furniture created by hand tools, Wright favored simple, unadorned forms. How to achieve these goals, though, put him in conflict with these idealists. As he stated in the 1901 speech, "The Art and Craft of the Machine",

"William Morris pleaded well for simplicity as the basis of all true art. Let us understand the significance to art of the word -- SIMPLICITY -- for it is vital to the Art of the Machine."

Source: Click here for Wright's declaration about the use of machines; portions of the text in the link adapted from Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920 New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49.

The Arts and Crafts philosophy at the turn of the century is locked into the handicraft ideal: in order to be "honest", the piece must be handmade. Wright never comes to terms with the Mission furniture of the Stickleys, Charles Rohlfs, and others. It is not incompatible with his interiors, but he feels intellectually superior to it; in its rudimentary construction it is conceptually a remnant of the 19th-century, whereas his, made by machine, is firmly in the 20th. The British designer C. R. Ashbee, who shared Wright's design esthetic but not his belief in the machine to achieve it, quotes Wright as saying,

"My God ... is machinery, and the art of the future will be the expression of the individual artist through the thousand powers of the machine, the machine doing all those things that the individual workman cannot do, and the creative artist is the man that controls all this and understands it.

Source: From the Ashbee Journals, December 1900 (ms. in Cambridge University Library), as cited by Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920, New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49.

Wright proves of course to be correct in his anticipation of the machine's future, but his refusal to acknowledge the impact of the Arts and Crafts Movement on his own evolving furniture style is readily disputed. An examination of contemporary periodicals, such as the London-based The Studio, while in America, sources such as The House Beautiful and The Western Architect, to which Wright surely is familiar demonstrate that prominent founders of Arts and Crafts design -- such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Charles F. A. Voysey, Ernest Gimson, and C R Ashbee -- introduced furniture with ladderback, spindle, and splat components -- as illustrated below -- before Wright's own productions. These exchanges, true, occurred in both directions, with obviouse "borrowing" on both sides of the Atlantic, but "Wright's later claim that

"No practice by any European architect to this day has influenced mine in the least"

As a definite link between the furniture and the architecture these square vertical spindles are indispensable in the Prairie School interiors. To create visual privacy without bottling up the ever flowing free space, they formed in screens between piers, walls, cabinets and ceilings. When repeated in the tall chair backs, and beneath the tables, they form such a complete bond that it is difficult to tell which belongs to the house and which belongs to the movable furniture.

Sources: Wright quote: Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament New York, 1957, page 205, as cited by Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920, New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49; Donald Kalec, "The Prairie School Furniture", The Prairie School Review 1, no 4, 1964, page 6; Donald Hoffmann, Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House: The Illustrated Story of an Architectural Masterpiece New York Dover Publications, 1984, page 73.

Square spindles have flat surfaces on all four sides, and while flat surfaces can be made with planes, their production is labor intensive. Among others, John Freeman Crosby observes, quite insightfully I think, that arts and crafts designs, with their straight, rectinlinear lines, are a product of the power machine. Thus the outcome of the "flap" about producing Arts and Crafts furniture with power machines -- rather by hand, as stronlgly urged by the purists - that emerged around 1900 is a for-gone conclusion. Rectilinear and circular saws are a natural blend.

According to David A Hanks,

"The idea of geometrically shaped slats as a decorative motif was probably derived from the Japanese".

Sources: David A. Hanks, The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright New York: Dover, 1979, pages 37-43; Yuko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism New York: Routledge, 2004, 2006; and Yuko Kikuchi, "The Mingei Movement", in Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry, eds, International Arts and Crafts London: V&A Publications, 2005, pages 296-310. Let me add, parenthetically, in 2005, in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, I toured the Arts and Crafts exhibit, and was mightily impressed with everything I saw. However, as with many things that happen to you in life, my background information was wanting, and when I went through the Japanese Arts ad Crafts section, did not get the kind of impression I would today, because now I am more "tuned in" about what to look for.

Early Examples of British Spindle Designs

Stair railing with lattice-work design in Frank Miles' house, in the Chelsea district of London, 1879, exhibits the impact of Japonisme that the architect-designer, Edwin William Godwin, is famous for.

Arthur H. Mackmurdo's fence for the Century Guild stand at the Liverpool International Exhibition of 1886 is another early instance of this idea in the West.

Of particular significance for the emerging Modern Movement are the visions of a new spirit in furnishing, one that shrugs off the excesses of the styles of the Victorian era. An example of this new spirit is the entrance of Voysey's own home, The Orchard, Chorley Wood, Buckinghamshire, of 1899.

1891 Wright Introduces Vertical Spindles

Spindles and slats are integral to Wright's Prairie Style architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright began designing tall-back chairs with squared vertical spindles in the 1890s, but according to Tod M. Volpe and Beth Cathers, Wright disputes his indebtedness to the English Arts and Crafts movement for the root of some of his design ideas.

Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship to the Arts and Crafts Movement, both indigenous and European, is not a simple one. Not unlike Augustus Pugin or William Morris or Ernest Gimson -- all of whose reformist beliefs and pracitces generate a resurgence of handicraft ideals when the negative aspects of the Industrial Revolution manifest themselves in late-Victorian England -- Wright favors of simple unadorned forms.

He differs sharply, however, in how these should be achieved. As he state in the famous speech, "The Art and Craft of the Machine," addressed to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House on 6 March 1901, "William Morris pleaded well for simplicity as the basis of all true art. Let us understand the significance to art of the word -- SIMPLICITY -- for it is vital to the Art of the Machine."

Source: Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Art and Craft of the Machine," in Catalogue of the Fourteenth Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club (Chicago Architectural Club), 1901, no pagination; as cited by Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920, New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49.

The Arts and Crafts philosophy at the turn of the century remained locked into the handicraft ideal: in order to be "honest," an item had to be handmade. Wright never came to terms with the Mission furniture of the Stickleys, Charles Rohlfs, and others. It is not incompatible with his interiors, but he felt intellectually superior to it; in its rudimentary construction it is conceptually a remnant of the 19th-century, whereas his, made by machine, is firmly in the 20th.

The British designer C. R. Ashbee, who shares Wright's design esthetic but not his belief in the machine to achieve it, quotes Wright as saying,

"My God ... is machinery, and the art of the future will be the expression of the individual artist through the thousand powers of the machine, the machine doing all those things that the individual workman cannot do, and the creative artist is the man that controls all this and understands it."

Click here for Wright's declaration about the use of machines

Source: From the Ashbee Journals, December 1900 (ms. in Cambridge University Library)as cited by Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920, New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49;as cited by Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920, New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49.

Wright proves to be correct in his anticipation of the machine's future, but his refusal to acknowledge the impact of the Arts and Crafts Movement on his own evolving furniture style is readily disputed.

A look at contemporary periodicals, The Studio, or, in America, House Beautifulor The Western Architect, to which Wright has access, shows that-- before Wright's spindle designs -- British architects and designers such as Voysey, Gimson, and Ashbee design furniture with ladderback, spindle, and splat components, who -- as you can see above, in turn -- pick up on the designs of Godwin.

With this evidence, Wright's later claim that "No practice by any European architect to this day has influenced mine in the least" is untrue.

Source: Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament, New York, 1957, p.205 as cited by Tod M. Volpe, Beth Cathers, Alastair Duncan, Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890-1920, New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1988, page 49.

The new woodworking machines of the day, which creates the conditions for furniture to be constructed rapidly and inexpensively, helps form Wright's notions of an aesthetic of furniture, defintiely radical for the era.

The characteristic use of vertical slats in furniture -- first seen in the 1891 Harlan House -- serves

1) as integral ornament and

2) as an architectural screening device that allows space to flow through while still an integral part of a chair.

The earliest chairs known to make use of vertical slats are probably those designed for his own dining room.

When Gustav Stickley first catalogs his own spindle furniture in 1905, he told his customers that it is

"built on slender lines, tall, graceful, and showing ... quaint refinement. The use of light spindles instead of broad bars in the backs of chairs and settles gives an effect that is rather more ornate than that of the heavier pieces".

Note that Stickley first markets the famous Morris chair in 1901, a chair designed by his first designer employee, Lamont Warner. Stickley's spindle furniture shows the high level of sophistication Craftsman designs can reach, and its refinement echoes the larger architectural refinements of the spacious Wrightian home.

Spindles/Slats in Morris Chairs:-- Gustav Stickley's 'Flat Bars'

Chairs that made use of vertical geometric slats had also been used by English designers in the 1890s. Here, for example, is the armchair designed by Wickham Jarvis, as illustrated in "Studio Talk," The International Studio, vol. 5, 1898, page 51. Editors at The International Studio show restraint in their description of the piece:

1900s:-- Gustav Stickley and "Square" Spindles

When speaking about Gustav Stickley's spindle armchair,

"It is often impossible to say with complete certainty when a particular Stickley design was first introduced. This, however, is not the case with his line of furniture with spindles"

So says Stickley scholar, David Cathers. Parenthetically, Cathers notes,

"Since spindles are usually thought of as round, rather than square, 'spindle' may seem to be the wrong name to apply to this furniture [style]. However, it is the name Stickley used to describe it."

According to Cathers, Stickley patents his spindle furniture on August 8, 1905. Furniture World August 17, 1905, reports that Stickley had been granted patent #37507 and #37508 for his spindle chair frames.

Stickley's high-backed armchair with spindles appears first in The Craftsman, September 1905, and then frequently for about 18 months. The first catalog appearance is 1906; in Stickley's 1907 "Descriptive Price List" it is described as a "hall chair."

Cathers continues:

The chair echoes the forms of normal-size dining-room armchairs, but in actuality is much larger. The design is clearly more delicate than Stickley's characteristic "mission" look. The vertical spindles emphasize the strong upward thrust of these pieces, and therefore may be said to show a definite relationship to Mackintosh's high-back chair designs. There is, of course, the strong influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on Stickley's spindle chairs.

By 1909 Stickley was phasing out his spindle designs. He did include a spindle armchair in that year's catalog, but it was 10 inches shorter than the earlier version and the spindle below the arms had been replaced by Stickley's characteristic stretcher arrangement. Since Stickley's spindle pieces were made for such a brief period, it is likely they did not achieve great commercial success. Pieces are found today only rarely.

While Stickley's -- i.e., Harvey Ellis' designs -- use of spindles suggests following the influence of spindle designs created by Frank Lloyd Wright, Wright is never mentioned in The Craftsman. According to the "Introduction" of the Supplement to Catalogue D

The use of light spindles instead of the broad bars in the backs of chairs and settles gives an effect that is rather more ornate than that of the heavier pieces, although it is in reality quite as structural and simple.

His spindle furniture gave Stickley elegant forms that, unlike the more costly to produce inlaid pieces, were readily accommodated to his factory's mechanized production capacities that did not require the services of an outside contractor. It gave him a cost-effective way to bring a measure of "quaint refinement" to Craftsman furniture, and was thus one line of defense in his campaign to counter the ear­lier criticisms that his work was too massive. The spindle line was to flourish only during the first four or five years of the Standard Stickley era, and by the end of the decade it would be dropped from production.

L. & J.G. Stickley make its own version of this spindle chair in 1910, but rather than spindles, it had thin lightweight slats.

Sources: Adapted from David M. Cathers Gustav Stickley New York: Phaidon, 2003, page 133; and Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts Movement New York: New American Library, 1982, page 148.

1897-1898

Several years before 1900, Gustav Stickley was evidently developing versions of the Morris chair idea, including both concepts: square posts and spindles on the sides. In the Christmas shopping seasons of 1897 and 1898, the Syracuse Herald features ads for a "Morris Chair" -- the 1898 ad includes this unclear artist's rendering, which at least allows us to see the rough outlines taking shape of the classic Morris chair Stickley created in the early 1900s. (December 14, 1897, page 10; December 11, 1898, page 22.)

This was also the period when Gustav Stickley was developing his "flat bars arranged vertically", the "m" parts of the description for Stickley's 1901 patent in the image above. (Later, evidently, he specifically identified the thin "flat bars" and/or the slats as spindles. Logic argues, though, that slats, in shape, in the cross-section, are rectangular, while spindles, in shape, also in the cross-section, are almost always square.)

Chronology of L. & J.G. Stickley's Arts and Crafts Period

1900

Early Period: 1900-1903

Onondago Shops: 1903-1906

Handcraft: 1906-?

The development of the L. & J.G. Stickley Handcraft pieces signaled a new matu­rity in their work.

These new designs exemplified a fresh approach whose roots could be traced to four stylistic sources:

1) the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwestern contemporaries,

2) English Arts and Crafts masters such as C. E. A. Voysey, A. H. Mackmurdo and Ernest Gimson,

3) the European reform movement espoused by Viennese architect-designers and

4) the Glasgow School and C. R. Mackintosh.

The infusion of these disparate influences, especially that of Prairie-school architects, revitalized the simple mission style and pushed the firm into a new prominence in the marketplace. The full realization of this new aesthetic would not be achieved for several years, but the work reproduced in the first Handcraft catalog illustrates the new directions.

Donald A. Davidoff, "Innovation and Deivation: The Contribution of L. & J.G. Stickley to the Arts and Crafts Movement", in Donald A. Davidoff and Stephen Gray, Innovation and Deivation: The Contribution of L. & J.G. Stickley to the Arts and Crafts Movement By Township of Parsippany-Troy Hills, Craftsman Farms Foundation, 1995, page 33.

---

---

Pivotal 1910 Catalog: Quarter Sawn White Oak

M. H. Baillie-Scott; Peter Hansen

American Prairie Style

English Arts and Crafts Masters: Voysey, Mackmurdo, Gimson

Donald A Davidoff, 1989. See Sources

1904-1905

Gus designed very few new pieces after 1910 (his last innovative designs were his spindle pieces of 1904-5) and relied instead on the simplification of his already existing designs.

1905

Morris Chair -- Gustav Stickley, 1905 Solid quartersawn white oak Leather upholstery 40" high, 33" wide, ... post construction, a virtually identical reissue of a Gustav Stickley design except that it incorporates the durable quadralinear post construction later perfected by Stickley's brother, Gustav... [am going to look at the context of this quote in the actual book]

Sources: Carla Lind, The Wright Style New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992; Barbara Mayer, In the Arts and Crafts Style San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993, page 22; David Cathers, Stickley Style: Arts and Crafts Homes in the Craftsman Tradition New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999; Kevin P Rodel and Jonathon Binzen, Arts and Crafts Furniture: From Classic to Contemporary Newtown, CT: Taunton Press, 2003, page 17

Check more details about the anatomy of the quadralinear post here

1913

Though designed on simple lines and void of decoration it is an expensive chair to build because of the absence of rectangular joints. The joints are all on a bevel, as can be seen by consulting the drawing. But when the pattern began to be copied the bevel joints were done away with, by which procedure the most essential feature, the rearwood droop of the seat, was abolished. Also were the number of spindles reduced a few at a time until there came to the front an individual more venturesome than the rest, as in figure 4, eliminating them en- tirely.

All this of course was done in the interest of cheapening the product, in process of which considerable may be done and the public be none the wiser. We start a Morris chair with sixteen spindles to a side, and not one customer in a dozen discovers the difference when some "cheapener" cuts the number in half. Given general simili- tude to the original, and the average person will deem them practically the same.

1914, 1923

Source: Paul D Otter, "The Morris Chair" from Paul D. Otter, Furniture for the Craftsman: A Manual for the Student and Mechanic, 1914, 1923. (According to the Preface, the drawings and the text originally appeared in issues of the trade journal, The Building Age, before 1914, a fact that I confirmed by obtaining photocopies of these articles.

1964

In 1964, Donald Kalec, in "The Prairie School Furniture" (The Prairie School Review, vol. 1, no. 4, fourth quarter), theorizes about the important role of Wright's furniture in setting an interior spatial flow and for creating architectural space. In this sense,

The articulation of the open space of Wright's interiors was often achieved by the movable and built-in furniture as well as by the image to come) had an important function in creating the secondary space of the room. The elongated slatted backs served as screens that defined the eating area, creating a room within the room.

1992

While none so focus on "carefully calculated horizontality" to evoke the "long horizon line of the prairie [itself]" as would the soon-to-be-produced Prairie settle, many of the pieces illustrated here do rely on the square spindle, found so ubiquitously in the work of the Prairie School architects. Kalec points out, these spindles served "as a definite link between the furniture and architecture" in that they supported "a sense of visual privacy without bottling up the ever free flowing space. "

Donald Kalec, "The Prairie School Furniture," Prairie School Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Fourth Quarter, 1964): 6 12.]

Source: Donald A Davidoff, "The Work of L & J G Stickley: The Mature Period and Design Sophistication", Arts and Crafts Quarterly 3, no 1 Winter 1989

As to the chair frame there is a field of change of style from Fig. 193. Using the same seat plan create a different treatment under the arms either by square spindles or three or four slats or flat balusters under the arms.

1964

In 1964, Donald Kalec -- in "The Prairie School Furniture", The Prairie School Review, vol. 1, no. 4, fourth quarter -- theorized about the important role of Wright's fur­niture in setting an interior spatial flow and for creating architectural space. In this sense,

the articulation of the open space of Wright's interiors was often achieved by the movable and built-in furniture as well as by the image to come) had an important function in creating the secondary space of the room. The elongated slatted backs served as screens that defined the eating area, creating a room within the room.

Source: adapted from David A. Hanks, The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright New York: Dover, 1979, pages 37-43, is still under construction:--

Sources

University of Wisconsin's Home Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture

Image and Text Collections:-- Link to University of Wisconsin Digital Collections (To access the options listed below for retrieving digitized material, including a full text version of The Craftsman, published by Gustav Stickley between 1900 and 1915, click on the link above) Decorative arts home Search the image collection Search the text collection Subject guides for text collection

adapted from David A. Hanks, The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright New York: Dover, 1979, pages 37-43, is still under construction:--

Donald A Davidoff, Early L. and J.G. Stickley Furniture: From Onondago Shops to Handcraft New York: Dover, 1992, page xiv.

David Thiel, [on Frank Lloyd Wright], Popular Woodworking, December, 2000, pages 72-76

Sources: David M. Cathers, Furniture of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Stickley and Roycroft Mission Oak New York: New American Library, 1981; Donald A Davidoff, ed., Early L. & J. G. Stickley Furniture New York: Dover, 1992 , pages xii-xiii; Vic Taylor, The woodworker's dictionary Hemel, Hempstead, England, Argus Books,1987, page 149; Carla Lind, The Wright Style New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992; Barbara Mayer, In the Arts and Crafts Style San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993, page 22; David Cathers, Stickley Style: Arts and Crafts Homes in the Craftsman Tradition New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999; Robert W. Lang, More Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture: 30 Stickley Designs for Every Room in the Home Bethel, CT: Cambium Press, 2002, pages 10-12; Kevin P Rodel and Jonathon Binzen, Arts and Crafts Furniture: From Classic to Contemporary Newtown, CT: Taunton Press, 2003, page 17

Check more details about the anatomy of the quadralinear post here