Table

Gustav Stickley, a leading designer and proselytizer of the American Arts and Crafts movement, designed this table early in his career. His company United Crafts, renamed Craftsman Workshops in 1904, manufactured his simply designed furniture, which was modestly priced to appeal to the average American. The first Stickley sales catalogue, called "New Furniture, From the Workshop of Gustave [sic] Stickley, Cabinet Maker, Syracuse, N.Y., U.S.A.," published in 1900, illustrated this table as "The Adder Tabourette, Number 33." The blossom-shaped tabletop is decorated with incised lines suggesting the leaves and buds of the adder's-tongue, or adder, a plant in the lily family that resembles a serpent's tongue. Related tables based on different flowers, such as foxglove and lotus, were also illustrated in the catalogue. In July 1900, George Clingman, chief buyer for the Tobey Furniture Company in Chicago, purchased examples of Stickley's "New Furniture" at the Grand Rapids Furniture Exposition. Subsequently, he arranged an exclusive agreement with Stickley to market these designs. Thus, the October 1900 Tobey catalogue, also called "New Furniture,” featured objects identical in design and name to those in the Stickley catalogue, including the tables based upon conventionalized flowers. Stickley was not mentioned in the Tobey catalogue, perhaps by his own choice, and by December 1900 his brief association with the Chicago firm ended. He soon launched a new line of Craftsman furniture and did not continue to produce these floral-based table designs, stating: "After experimenting with a number of pieces, such as small tables giving in their form a conventionalized suggestion of such plant forms as the mallow, the sunflower, and the pansy, I abandoned the idea. Conventionalized plant forms are beautiful and fitting when used solely for decoration, but anyone who starts to make a piece of furniture with a decorative form in mind, starts at the wrong end. The sole consideration at the basis of the design must be the thing itself and not its ornamentation."