Desk

This drop-front desk is a product of the brief collaboration, from March 1903 to January 1904, between Gustav Stickley, the leading designer and proselytizer of the American Arts and Crafts movement, and the Prairie School architect Harvey Ellis. "The Craftsman," a periodical promoting the Arts and Crafts movement published by Stickley between 1901 and 1916, first illustrated an example of this form embellished with decorative inlay in the January 1904 issue, but it was actually designed in 1903. After Ellis's premature death on January 2, 1904, Stickley continued production of this form but without inlay, the use of which seems to have contradicted Stickley’s concept of simple, honest design. The desk, like all of Stickley’s Craftsman furniture, was manufactured by his company, Craftsman Workshops, called United Crafts before 1904. Stickley sales catalogues listed the desk as "Ladies' Desk Number 706." The 1904 catalogue offered it in "Craftsman Fumed Oak, Silver Gray Maple, or Mahogany" for $30.00, $33.00, or $37.50, respectively, with a choice of "wrought iron," copper, or "old brass" hardware. The oak version appeared in Stickley catalogues and other publications as late as 1913. The Stickley brand on this example first came into use in 1912, thus placing the manufacture of the piece between 1912 and 1913. Despite the use of standard Stickley elements such as oak and hammered copper hardware, the design departs from typical Craftsman furniture in its overall lightness of form, subtle structural detailing (including the hidden support system for the drop front), and the use of poplar, a light, fine-grained wood, for the interior of the desk. Also distinctive is the trim overhanging top with a beveled edge, a design element that Harvey Ellis shared with contemporary British designers Charles Ronnie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and C. F. A. Voysey (1857–1941).