Community

Upcoming Events

Jan 15: Pasadena, CA- Sidney D. Gamble Lecture Series, "The Bungalow: From Pasadena to Australia"

Jan 21: New York, NY - Winter Antiques Show

Jan 22: Golden, CO - Colorado Arts and Crafts Society Annual Winter Symposium

February 5: Denver, CO - Old House Fair

February 12-13: Pasadena, CA - 12th Annual Los Angeles Pottery Show

Popular Articles

Researching The History Of Your Home

The Bungalow Garage

Exterior Paint Colors

Tips For Tile Collecting

Arts & Crafts Fonts

Harris Lebus - Arts and Crafts Style For Trade

The Sideboard That Inspired an Odyssey - A 1903 Production Piece by Harris Lebus

filler text

By Nancy Hiller

In an out-of-the-way corner of Tottenham in northern London, a narrow footpath leads across a meadow from the banks of the River Lea to a row of brick industrial buildings that clearly have seen better days. The buildings’ current occupants are the sort of businesses most of us take for granted: a manufacturer of decorative cake bases, a moving company, a recording studio.

Separated from this hidden pocket of enterprise by a row of burly sycamores is a garden, normally secure behind a padlocked gate but open this morning to nearby residents—recent immigrants who work the soil, keeping their homeland traditions alive while subsidizing their hopes for a better future. The garden is a riot of bright colors and soft edges. Blue barrels gather rain. Narrow limbs dropped by the sycamores have been roped into arbors for bean and tomato vines. Wild currants and blackberries grow in thickets wherever their exuberance is tolerated. An elderly man and his daughter emerge through the open gate, their bags bulging with peppers and cucumbers.

Up the road toward Ferry Lane, a massive crater is being excavated by a pair of gigantic laboring cranes. Hoardings (Brit-speak for temporary billboards) announce the construction of a multistory apartment building with waterfront views. One of the banners reads “In harmony with nature.” Another declares the coming development “A place for reflection.” Gulls keen overhead. Meanwhile, an unbroken stream of traffic flows across the humpback bridge that borders the construction site. The bridge’s hollow arc amplifies the screech of braking buses and the rumble of heavy trucks.

The Circa 1905 Hallstand Has Beveled Door Rails, A Signature Lebus Design Detail

Rediscovering Harris Lebus
As I was to learn, a hundred years before, this stretch of riparian real estate had been home to a very different sort of activity.
During the summer of 2007 I had the opportunity to take on some speculative work. Russ Herndon, a Bloomington, Ind., designer and neighbor, had a distinctive English Arts and Crafts sideboard. His dealer, Chuck Johnson, of Southern Indiana Arts and Crafts Antiques, believed the sideboard might have been made for Liberty & Co., the firm whose shops in Regent Street, London, made Arts and Crafts–influenced furnishings and other wares available to middle-class buyers before and after the turn of the 20th century.

A collector of English and American Arts and Crafts, Russ was no newcomer to the genre; he counted Stickley, Roycroft and Limbert originals among his holdings. But this sideboard, about whose origins he could not be certain, was one of his favorites, in part because of its refinement relative to the severity of many American Arts and Crafts classics.

The cabinet’s style is distinctly English, with exaggerated bevels, broad overhangs, graceful arches and bold interplay between the vertical and horizontal elements. Still, there is something homely about it. The oak is plainsawn, not quartered. The grain of the drawer faces isn’t matched. The drawers were dovetailed by machine. Hardly the sort of quality we associate with the finest Arts and Crafts. Yet it is a beautiful, functional object. I asked Russ if he would let me craft a reproduction, and he agreed. We called it the Liberty sideboard.

Several months later Russ told me he had contacted the U.K.–based Arts and Crafts dealer Mark Golding, who directed him to a page from an auction company’s Web site. There on the screen was a cabinet identical to Russ’s. “An Arts and Crafts oak mirror-back sideboard…registered in 1903,” read the description. Harris Lebus had been the maker.

Harris Lebus? Neither of us had ever heard the name.

A search of the Web turned up a brochure that had been produced in conjunction with an exhibition, “Investigating the Past—The Harris Lebus Factory.” (An Acrobat PDF of the brochure is available online; Google “lebus exhibition.”) The company had lasted a very long time—from its origins in the 1840s until the mid–20th century. It had been substantial, employing some 6,000 workers at its peak during the 1940s. It had been founded by a Jewish tradesman and had been well known during the early 1900s as an employer of Jewish immigrants. It seemed clear that interest in the company had been revived by the local government, which was working with a group of property developers on the riverfront project.

This seemed a story worth pursuing. The Bruce Castle Museum had hosted the exhibition. I contacted Deborah Hedgecock, the curator, and booked a trip.

For The Reproduction Sideboard, Art Glass Was Commissioned From Anne Ryan Miller In Place Of The Original Sideboard's Hammered Copper Panels

Early Years
Harris Lebus had its origins in the 1840s when Louis Lebus, a German-Jewish cabinetmaker, emigrated to England from Breslau. Louis enjoyed good fortune in England. He set up shop as a cabinetmaker in the port city of Hull, where his business flourished. He then moved to London, where he outgrew one set of premises after another, and in 1875 he moved with his family to the relatively prosperous Georgian neighborhood of Wellclose Square. After he died in 1879, his eldest son, Harris, took over the firm. Six years later, he relocated the shop to Tabernacle Street in Finsbury, in London’s East End.

London’s furniture industry had changed markedly in the mid-19th century. As a growing middle class aspired to live in style, the demand for affordable furniture prompted the development of furniture manufacturing in the East End. Unlike West End shops, which had a long tradition of refined craftsmanship grounded in the apprenticeship system, the East End offered opportunities for entrepreneurs of large ambition and little means, many of whom kept costs low by working to order and dividing furniture construction into a series of simple processes that could be carried out by workers of limited skill.

By the mid-1880s, Harris Lebus was no small-time tradesman but the head of an established firm with dedicated manufacturing premises outside his family’s home. Although the company had not originated in the hardscrabble world of East End furniture making, it prospered mightily in that milieu. By the 1890s Lebus had become England’s largest furniture maker, with around a thousand employees.

Between 1890 and 1910, the company produced some of its loveliest Arts and Crafts designs, one particular line of which is exemplified by the 1903 sideboard. The pieces were made in oak and incorporated stylistic elements as varied as exaggerated bevels and bracket-supported overhangs, ring-turned feet, beaten copper panels with Art Nouveau motifs, capped finials and heavy, Gothic hardware. It was not unusual for several of these elements to appear in a single piece. The company’s designs are further notable for their wide stylistic variation; some pieces are graceful and refined, others angular and chunky. Delicate and muscular are often combined, as are Gothic and Art Nouveau.

Original Drawings For A Set Of Bedroom Furniture Registered In 1901. Photo Courtesy The National Archives, U.K.

These conflations suggest that Lebus was guided more by market fashions than by the depth of aesthetic integrity for which the Arts and Crafts movement’s leaders strove. Indeed, Patch Rogers, an English antiques dealer formally trained in furniture restoration, says that among producers of English Arts and Crafts furnishings he “would probably class [Lebus] as scraping the [bottom of the] second division.” In contrast to the movement’s idealistic protagonists, Rogers says, Lebus should be understood as a successful manufacturer “responding to a huge consumer hunger for furniture.”

And respond Lebus did, producing wardrobes, dressers, dining sets, hallstands and sideboards. The company had a private phone line for calls from Maples, a large furnishings store located near Heal’s on the Tottenham Court Road in downtown London and Lebus’s most valuable commercial account. A salesman called on Maples twice daily to take orders. The company also exported to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and South America, in addition to France, where they had a showroom on Paris’s rue de Faubourg Saint-Antoine. In New York they sold their products through Wanamaker’s.

Lebus further responded to the demands of commercial survival by regularly updating its premises and equipment. In January 1900, needing room for further expansion, the company purchased 13 1/2 acres of land in Tottenham—at the time a village north of London on the marshy banks of the River Lea. The river location was ideal for receiving materials, many of which came from overseas—hardwoods from the United States and softwoods from eastern Europe. The new factory was also located on two railroad lines. The Lebus works at this location would eventually cover 43 acres.

The Sideboard From The First Decade Of The 20th Century Exemplifies How Lebus Mixed And Matched Design Elements Such As Bevels, Wide Overhangs And Ring-Turned Feet

Longevity through Versatility
Unlike Morris’s Firm, Mackmurdo’s Century Guild, Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and others, the Harris Lebus Co. was no small group of artisan-philosophers but a factory-based, capitalistic enterprise. Its wares were made by specialized workers in diverse departments, a practice that would have made the movement’s luminaries shudder.

Nor is Harris Lebus known for the signature designs of a Voysey or Mackintosh. Whatever artistry its Arts and Crafts–style furniture possessed was patiently brought forth by the company’s principal designer, one Mr. Archer, who had to suffer the indignity of seeing his creations tweaked by profit-driven directors. The company also made parts for other furniture manufacturers and occasionally subcontracted production to other shops.

Notwithstanding Lebus’s capitalistic raison d’être and unabashed reliance on popular designs, it would be a mistake to regard the company as lacking principles or values. Through several generations, the family directors steered a steady course, neither ruthlessly exploiting their workers nor abandoning their enterprise on the grounds that they would never achieve social or artistic perfection. The company’s Arts and Crafts furniture may have been made in a factory, but the workers who made it enjoyed conditions radically superior to those endured by their Dickensian predecessors.

Harris Lebus continued operating into the 1960s, keeping thousands of workers employed through some of England’s most challenging years, largely by virtue of its success in adapting to changing times. During the first World War, the company produced materiel for the ground war on the continent as well as parts for Handley Page and Vickers-Vimy aircraft. During World War II, with 6,000 employees, the company manufactured Horsa gliders and Mosquito jets, assault-landing craft, and wooden replicas of Sherman tanks designed to deceive German pilots flying air reconnaissance. In the postwar years, it participated in a government-sponsored plan to provide affordable utility furniture to returning veterans and their families whose homes had been destroyed by bombing and rocket attacks.

This very longevity may be one of the reasons for Lebus’s lack of visibility among today’s Arts and Crafts enthusiasts. In contrast to the movement’s leaders, who went down with their ships early in the century rather than adapt to changing fashions after the first World War, Lebus deftly responded to public demand, turning out wares in more streamlined modern styles for another 50 years.

Ironically, much of the company’s newfound visibility has resulted from the assessment and cleanup of the urban brownfield that eventually resulted from its closing. Around 2004, the Borough of Haringey pursued plans to transform the former Lebus property north of Ferry Lane into a riverside asset, which entailed testing for toxic residues left from earlier uses of the land. That investigation led researchers to rediscover the almost forgotten company. Recognizing that the Lebus story held the potential to strengthen community identity, the borough subsidized the exhibition at the Bruce Castle Museum. Today, Hale Village, a mixed-use development that will include a significant percentage of affordable housing, is under construction, with completion expected in 2012.

Heritage
What of the considerable body of Arts and Crafts furniture Lebus produced? An increasing number of pieces pass in and out of antiques stores today, all things Arts and Crafts having found new appreciation during the past 40 years. The furniture is there; awareness of the company has just been slow to emerge among Americans.

Its relative obscurity notwithstanding, the story of Harris Lebus furniture offers new perspective on how Arts and Crafts ideas influenced daily living among the growing English, European and American middle classes during and after the movement’s golden age. Much as the Craftsman or California bungalow became the commonplace embodiment of what Morris might have called an “artful life for the people,” the easily taken-for-granted “second division” Arts and Crafts furniture manufactured by Harris Lebus lent new and graceful meaning to living in style in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the 20th century.

Paul Collier, who lives nearby and has extensively researched the company's history, identifies this barge tie-up as one probably used in transporting lumber up to the factory via the River Lea

Writer and cabinetmaker Nancy Hiller lived and worked in England for 16 years before returning to the U.S. in 1986. She is grateful to the following individuals and institutions for their contributions to this article: Roy and Mimi Griffiths; Keith Bartlett and Mary Fran Gilbert; Paul Collier; The Geffrye Museum, London; Bruce Castle Museum, London; and The Westminster Archives.

2 Comments »

By David Cathers

Collecting American Arts and Crafts furniture in the early 1970s was simple and straightforward. You searched and searched and searched, and when you were lucky enough to find, say, an actual piece of Gustav Stickley furniture, you’d buy it, almost no matter what. Unless you tallied up the expense of driving many thousands of miles year after year, it didn’t cost much money, because in those days almost nobody wanted that furniture. Established antiques dealers looked down their noses at such 20th-century “junk.” By about 1980, though, prices for Gustav Stickley furniture began their inexorable rise, and since the late 1980s they’ve occasionally reached stratospheric heights.

During the first years of the 1970s there was other Arts and Crafts furniture you searched for, too, mostly Roycroft, L. & J.G. Stickley, Stickley Brothers and Limbert. On the East Coast, we combed New York State for the work of Charles Rohlfs. Others hunted for the decorative designs of Frank Lloyd Wright and, on the West Coast, a handful of collectors sought Greene and Greene. Beyond those, a few large-scale makers were known then, for instance the Michigan furniture firms Lifetime and Luce, the Cincinnati-based Shop of the Crafters, New York’s Joseph P. McHugh and a smattering of others.

But beyond these re-emerging names lay a baffling terra incognita of unidentified furniture that collectors, dealers and auction houses came to label “generic mission.” While it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know exactly how much of that furniture was made, for 10 or 15 years it poured out of American factories in huge quantities: A 1908 industry survey, for instance, listed 148 manufacturers specializing in “mission furniture.” Though often it was pretty scrappy stuff, many pieces were well designed, solidly constructed and nicely finished. Clearly there had once been a number of manufacturing firms, their names long lost, that had produced this furniture with considerable care. For many modern-day Arts and Crafts enthusiasts, this vast landscape remained unknown territory until the pioneering husband-and-wife team of Michael Clark and Jill Thomas-Clark ventured into it about 1988.

Michael, a professor of speech and theater at Elmira College in Elmira, N.Y., and Jill, registrar of the Corning Museum of Glass in nearby Corning, began buying American Arts and Crafts when they married and moved to Elmira in 1984-deciding, reasonably, that they should collect something they both liked. Together they have built their collection of Arts and Crafts furniture, lighting and textiles over the last two decades, making most of their finds in small-town auctions scattered across New York State. They’ve also branched out, buying Onondaga Pottery dinnerware made in Syracuse in the early 1900s,

Belgian and American art pottery, Russel Wright dinnerware from the 1930s and ‘40s, Maxfield Parrish prints, and copper and aluminum artware hand wrought by the Avon Coppersmith. The two, with graduate degrees in the arts and art history, became eclectic and knowledgeable collectors, buying what they liked, what they wanted to research and what they could use in their 1905 Arts and Crafts-era home. They have never held on to pieces solely because they are rare or unique. As Jill says, “We have always kept the things we like to live with. We preserve and protect the furniture we collect, but we also use it.” They’e said they would rather have a roomful of Arts and Crafts furniture than “one piece of Gus.”

In their career they’ve mapped a whole territory of previously unknown or little-known New York State Arts and Crafts furniture makers-about 50 so far. These firms- whose work had been relegated to the dim reaches of the “generic mission” universe until the Clarks identified and wrote about them- have become familiar names to Arts and Crafts enthusiasts. Among them are Plail Brothers Chair Company, in Wayland; Majestic Chair Company, in Herkimer; Quaint Art Furniture Company, in Syracuse; H.C. Dexter Chair Company, in Black River; and the Stickley & Brandt Company, in Binghamton. The Clarks have profiled these and other makers in their much read “Best of the Rest” series in Style 1900 magazine. In 1999, at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., they curated “Imitation and Innovation: An Evaluation of Arts and Crafts Furniture in Central New York,” the first-ever museum exhibition of the furniture once known only as “generic mission.”

All that is not to say that they have ignored Stickley. In 2002 they published The Stickley Brothers, the sole book that charts the personal and professional interactions of Gustav, Leopold, Albert, Charles and John George. They are regulars at the Grove Park Inn conference, where they lead small-group discussions each year. In 2002, they revealed some of their trade secrets in a session on their adventures as “Arts and Crafts Sleuths,” and in 2005 they lectured on a topic close to the heart of everyone at the conference (and certainly many readers of this magazine): “From William Morris to Archie Bunker: The Evolution of the Morris Chair.”

Beyond “Generic Mission”

When they began collecting in earnest, they knew, as art historians and researchers, that they could not long be satisfied with such a vague designation as “generic mission” for the furniture turning up at country auctions. They needed to learn more about this little-explored landscape and its inhabitants.

Perhaps providentially, it was an unusually well designed and beautifully made slat-backed armchair they found at a local auction in 1988 that provided a case study, as it were, for their education.

The maker of the chair (which they snapped up for $35) was unknown. The only clue, and it was a tantalizing one, was a fragmentary oval black paper label on the underside printed with ornate gold script that was no longer legible. It wasn’t until the following year, at the 1989 Grove Park Inn Arts and Crafts Conference, that they found a dealer who had an identical chair with an intact label. It read “J.M. Young & Sons. Camden, New York.” As Michael recalls, “I remember walking into the room at the antique show and looking to my left, and our same chair was on a table. I walked/rushed to it and flipped it up and there was the J.M. Young & Sons oval label.”

J.M. Young furniture was attracting a few collectors by then because it offered a Stickley-like level of craftsmanship at less-than-Stickley prices. But little was known about it. Who was J.M. Young? When did this firm produce Arts and Crafts furniture, and how much had been made? And what had become of the company?

Though at this point they had many questions and few answers, that single, intact paper label was the catalyst for their journey of discovery into the world of “generic mission.”

Discovering J.M. Young

As the first step of their research into J.M. Young, Jill contacted the Historical Society of Camden, N.Y. She immediately experienced one of the incredible strokes of good luck that seem to come most often to dedicated and resourceful researchers: the woman she reached, one of the society’s volunteers, knew the firm well because her husband had been its last owner, and- astonishingly- she still had its surviving records in her possession. Just before the old Young factory was to be demolished in 1979, she and her husband had retrieved as many of the firm’s papers as they could find. They packed them into cardboard boxes and stored them away, hoping that someone, one day, would consider them important.

Offering to research and interpret this trove and ultimately donate it to Winterthur-the preeminent decorative arts museum and library in Winterthur, Delaware-the Clarks brought the boxes home. They had in their hands the firm’s sales journals, letters and furniture photos, as well as facts about construction techniques, woods, stains and finishes. They excitedly pulled from the boxes two small books, more precious to a researcher than gold: shop drawings containing, as they later wrote, “measurements and design changes handwritten by J.M. and [his son] George Young.”

They also retrieved other crucial details of the shop’s Arts and Crafts work, including records showing the dates when specific armchairs, rockers and tables were first made, how many of each model were sold and when they were dropped from production. (Among their discoveries was that the chair that had started it all was a #1916 armchair, made in 1927.) And, intent on gathering the kind of direct, firsthand insights that can’t be gleaned from business papers, they found and talked with the factory’s few surviving workers and befriended J.M.’s grandson, Gordon. Studying those dusty documents and arranging personal interviews gave the Clarks an intimate view of the firm’s day-to-day operations during the years-a surprisingly long span of them, as it turned out-when J.M. Young & Sons made Arts and Crafts furniture.

In 1994 they shared their discoveries with other collectors and scholars in their first book, J.M. Young Arts and Crafts Furniture, still the definitive source of information on the firm’s work. John McIntosh Young, they had learned, was a Scottish immigrant, a woodcarver who opened his furniture manufacturing business in 1872, in Camden, about 30 miles northeast of Syracuse, and began making elaborate Victorian chairs, tables and cabinets, along with more utilitarian, bread-and-butter furniture. His was a small, family-run enterprise, with J.M. and his sons busy each day in their factory alongside a workforce of some 12 to 14 men.

In 1902, the company abruptly changed direction and began producing Arts and Crafts furniture influenced by Gustav Stickley and L. & J.G. Stickley in addition to its original designs. Though it was organized like most other American furniture manufacturers of its day and had an efficient factory equipped with up-to-date machinery, it added an extra dimension of handicraft. As Jill and Michael have written, “In identifying the works … one will find the diversity of the artist craftsman at work. J.M. Young, his sons and collective of craftsmen, working in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement, often made design modifications on the spot to create an individualized piece.”

The Clarks’ research revealed surprising and significant facts about J.M. Young. They learned that when Leopold Stickley’s company stopped making Arts and Crafts furniture, about 1922, he at first filled orders from stock on hand, then turned to the Youngs to replicate several of his most popular models and recreate his fumed finishes. In other words, some ÒL. & J.G. Stickley furniture- was in fact made by J.M. Young. Young continued manufacturing these designs on a limited basis into the 1940s-startling evidence that in some instances “mission” furniture making continued much longer than is commonly believed.

Today, Jill and Michael are not just scholarly chroniclers of J.M. Young. They are ardent collectors who’ve filled their home with the firm’s best Arts and Crafts furniture, a unique collection their passion for research has helped to shape.

Who Made All Those Brown Oak Lamps?

The Clark home is also the showplace for another of their passions, a large collection of “mission” table lamps-about 50-that has grown out of their exploration of the mysteries of Arts and Crafts lighting. A common sight in American homes a hundred years ago and frequently seen in collections today, these lamps are mostly straight-lined, made of quartersawn oak stained brown, and have varicolored art glass shades, occasionally leaded but often not. Yet as familiar as these lamps are, their origins have long perplexed collectors. Though some were evidently shop-class projects produced by students and others the efforts of amateur woodworkers, most were clearly factory made.

But what factory? Probably there were several manufacturers, and their names are still obscure. When the Clarks came across a rare 1912 catalog, though, something clicked, and they presented their major discovery at the 2001 Grove Park Inn Conference in a lecture that asked, “Who Made All Those Brown Oak Lamps?” The answer turned out to be-yes-the W.B. Brown Company, of Bluffton, Ind., a manufacturer that touted its wares with the hearty, self-confident slogan, “A Firm with A Mission.”

As Jill and Michael discovered, the forgotten Mr. Brown created light fixtures that were “designed and constructed to blend harmoniously with the total Arts and Crafts environment.” In Style 1900 they wrote that he used “efficient design and production methods” that made his stylish lighting affordable and “easily shipped in great quantities.” Brown’s factory relied on machine power to mass-produce table lamps and ceiling lights, but the products were also marked by handcraftsmanship of its highly skilled staff: “the artistry of individual workers,” as the Clarks wrote, “remains evident in each fixture.” Like J.M. Young and the other Arts and Crafts furniture makers uncovered by their research, Brown helped popularize the movement and brought its “modern” idea of simple design to a large and appreciative middle-class market. A book on Arts and Crafts lighting, focusing on Brown and many other makers, will be the Clarks’ next project.

The Furniture in the Attic

These pioneering scholars and collectors hope in the years ahead to devote even more time to the Arts and Crafts subjects that matter to them most. “We write only what we want to write,” they told me. “It is a labor of love.” Though they live mainly with J.M. Young furniture and W.B. Brown lamps, they also have a “study collection” stored in their attic. I haven’t had a chance to explore that attic, and I’m curious: just what, exactly, is up there? And, whatever it is, who designed and made it? One day, I expect, the Clarks’ ongoing labor of love will produce more answers.

2 Comments »