Zulma Steele and William Morris

Nature Conventionalized at Byrdcliffe

d erin T anyol

Former Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild

An elegant oak chiffonier (fig. 1) with door inserts painted by Hermann Dudley Murphy is one of the most frequently reproduced objects created at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, which manufactured furniture from late 1903 to the summer of 1905.1 A modular design used in several extant examples,2 the chest illustrates Byrdcliffe’s distinctive take on the Arts and Crafts style. Its sturdy minimalism, fully rectilinear composition, and refusal of intricate turnings and other nonfunctional decorative components define the economy of craftsmanship of the movement. Equally emblematic of Byrdcliffe’s design language are the chiffonier’s painted doors. Most of the Byrdcliffe chests, drop-front desks, and linen presses (storage units with drawers and doors used before built-in closets were standard)3 feature painted or carved panel inserts on their faces. Byrdcliffe ornamentation is sourced predominantly from local plant life or, as here, landscape, reveling in the organic splendor that seduced Byrdcliffe founders Ralph and Jane Whitehead and other colony residents to go make art on a mountaintop in Woodstock, New York.

Yet the pictorial style of Murphy’s painted doors represents neither Byrdcliffe’s most prevalent decorative idiom nor typical Arts and Crafts design. It was painter, printmaker, and designer Zulma Steele (1881–1979) who would most fully establish Byrdcliffe’s decorative vocabulary, her furniture designs defining the colony’s response to the Arts and Crafts movement. Indeed, Murphy’s dreamy Tonalist landscape of a river receding into the distance is anathema to Arts and Crafts aesthetics in its perspectival conviction. The leading man of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris (1834–1896), was an English designer of textiles, wallpaper, and furniture whose teachings helped the Whiteheads envision their Arts and Crafts colony, and whose furnishings decorated their homes.4 Morris had a lot to say about the weary disappointment induced by works of art that took direct replication of nature and three-dimensional space as their points of departure. Renowned for his wallpaper designs in which stylized flowers, vines, leaves, and birds conjoin into energetic all-over patterns (figs. 2 and 3), Morris called for decorating “with ornament that reminds us of the outward face of the earth . . . I say, with ornament that reminds us of these things . . . because scientific representation of them would again involve us in the problems of hard fact and the troubles of life.”5

Ralph Whitehead echoed this sentiment in his book of essays, Grass of the Desert (1892), writing that art “has conventions, a special language through which it must speak . . . [P]ainting is no more the simple imitation of the exterior of natural objects than music is the imitation of natural sounds.”6 Through clarity of suggestion and solid design principles instead of what Morris considered “toilsome” mimesis, nature could be, and should be, beautifully conventionalized. Used by thinkers and critics including Whitehead, Morris, and their eminent intellectual guide John Ruskin, the term “conventionalized” is what we today call “stylized.” Conventionalization underlined the conviction that, simply put, art itself was the point of art, with the pleasure and comfort that its creation brought both to maker and user nevertheless tendering dramatic possibilities for social change.7

Zulma Steele left us nothing in the way of writings on art—or on any subject, for that matter—but her “conventionalized” designs demonstrate a studied adherence to the aesthetic prescriptions of William Morris. She arrived in Woodstock when Byrdcliffe first opened its doors to artists in 1903. Steele and her collaborator and probable partner Edna Walker8 came to explore Byrdcliffe on the recommendation of painter and printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow, with whom they both studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.9 While artists like Hermann Dudley Murphy and Birge Harrison lived and worked at Byrdcliffe only briefly,10 Steele was in it for the long haul, returning as a summer resident regularly (with gaps for travel to Europe, Haiti, and Puerto Rico)11 until the mid-1920s, with Walker joining her for many of those sojourns. Steele created paintings, prints in different media, and textiles and ceramics, but she spent her first year at Byrdcliffe mostly making furniture designs.

Furniture production at the colony was a collaborative process, in which designers like Steele and Walker would create drawings of decorative elements for various furniture prototypes. Upon Whitehead’s approval12 the designs were executed in the woodshop, a building called the Bottega, which burned down in 197813 Whitehead had studied cabinet-making in Europe14 but, as with all his creative endeavors, he was more enchanted learner than adroit craftsman. For the craftsman requirement, he enlisted Fordyce Herrick as foreman of the woodshop, with Nordic cabinet makers Olaf Westerling and Riulf Erlenson also on the rolls.15 Jane Whitehead sometimes participated in production by applying stains to completed furnishings. She was known to be critical of others’ finishing techniques and sometimes required pieces to be sanded down to the natural wood and stained all over again.16

Steele’s decorating schemes for desks, tables, chairs, sideboards, and more, which date to about 1904, include signature botanical motifs—such local flora as lilies, woodbine, and irises—that walk the conventionalized line between naturalism and abstraction. Her ink and watercolor woodbine design (fig. 4), for a painted frieze on a desk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,17 abounds with leaves—realistic in their subtle veins and crimped edges, yet stylized in their sharply delineated contours filled with color. These dark outlines are reminiscent of both Japanese printmaking and Morris, who wrote that “definite form bounded by firm outlines is a necessity for all ornament”18 (see, for example, his Acanthus wallpaper, fig. 2).

Steele’s leaves are the rich reddish-brown of autumn, the season when clusters of woodbine berries, which punctuate the design at regular intervals, come to maturity. Like the botanical studies by Steele in the permanent collection of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild,19 the woodbine in the desk design translates into an immediately recognizable plant, more imitative than elements in Morris’s wallpaper, for example. Yet the woodbine water- color is attendant more to decorative design principles than to naturalism. In an all-over composition anchored at left, center, and right by three larger leaf clusters, the woodbine is connected by a network of vine tendrils that perform the same structural function as the wooden trellis in Morris’s wallpaper (fig. 3), flattening the motifs within a restricted vertical space that is connected and compressed laterally. Equally in keeping with Arts and Crafts tactics for repressing three dimensionality, Steele’s woodbine casts no shadows, whether on itself or on its surroundings. Morris impatiently described the artlessness of spatial realism in mainstream Victorian wallpaper as “sham-real boughs and flowers, casting sham-real shadows on your walls.”20

A second of Steele’s woodbine watercolors (fig. 5) is an example of a decorative system unique to Byrdcliffe furniture, in which two or three painted or carved panels, recessed into doors, give the illusion of a continuous narrative—whether of botanical elements or, in the case of Murphy’s chiffonier (fig. 1), a river—between and behind the undecorated parts of the furniture.21 The illusion in the Murphy is of a distant river viewed through two windows side by side. In Steele’s woodbine triptych, however, the rectangular “windows” enclose a two-dimensional surface design rather than a view into space. A branch of woodbine moves upward diagonally from the lower right, disappears behind a wooden stile stained red, reemerges at center, and disappears again before terminating at a cluster of berries in the left panel. The naturalism of the plant is underlined by its “living” behind the vertical dividers, only to be dominated by stylization in its flat background and absence of shadows. The woodbine triptych was probably also intended for a drop-front desk, this time for the exterior of the drop-down writing surface rather than as a frieze across the top (as in fig. 4, discussed above).

The detailed woodbine nature study upon which this design is based (fig. 6) reveals that Steele transferred specific leaf formations and general contours from the study to the completed furniture design, but repositioned foliage to create compositional balance between the three individual panels. From the botanical study to the evolved three-paneled furniture design, she removed any shading or leaf veins and flattened the leaf forms, most notably in the central panel.

Whether working out in the field with her watercolor box or bringing plant specimens back to the studio, Steele knew that study of nature and reliable drawing were cardinal skills for a good designer, a doctrine espoused by both William Morris and John Ruskin. In a lecture delivered at the Trades Guild of Learning and the Birmingham Society of Artists, Morris noted:

The decorator’s art . . . does not excuse want of observation of nature, or laziness of drawing, as some people think. On the contrary, unless you know plenty about the form that you are conventionalizing, you will . . . find it impossible to give people a satisfactory impression of what is in your own mind about it, but you will also be so hampered by your own ignorance that you will not be able to make your conventionalized form ornamental.22

Ruskin, who was dismissive (or at least less enamored) of conventionalized forms in art, also insisted that any decorative art form must begin with direct imitation of nature, starting with the human form as a true test of ability. Anyone, he wrote, can create a conventionalized leaf design.23

This woodbine design, both in the nature study and in its tripartite translation into a desk front, has a compositional detail in common with Steele’s many botanical studies of azalea, dogwood, maple leaves, and more. The plant is presented as a single, diagonal branch, usually laid out from lower right to upper left. In an 1881 lecture at the Working Men’s College, William Morris described “the diagonal branch” as one of eight elementary construction tools in successful pattern design.24 Diagonal flower stems and boughs, sometimes creating an x-like patterning or lattice-work, are common in his wallpaper designs. In Steele’s drawings, the diagonal orientation of the branches allows for the most surface coverage on the paper and, therefore, more compositional options for transferring the design to furniture. In one watercolor study of apple blossoms, Steele tilted the page and superimposed three vertical rectangles in pencil over the flowering branch in the manner that most appealingly filled the intended furniture panels with flowers and leaves.25

The cherry Drop-Front Desk with Iris Panels (figs. 7 and 8),26 one of the highlights of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s permanent collection, adapts Steele’s innovative three-paneled format to a low-relief carving rather than a painted design. Here, the five irises and their arcing leaves are compressed into a completely flat plane. The flat-carving technique employed for the irises amplifies the flatness of the design rather than creating a sense of dimensionality—as carving and relief usually do. It is as if the door were a large printing woodblock.

While Steele or her collaborator Edna Walker transferred their own pictorial designs to painted furniture, carvings at Byrdcliffe were often the handiwork of Giovanni Battista Troccoli, an Italian artist who lived and taught at the colony.27 Yet he was an advanced craftsman who excelled at intricate chiseling techniques rather than the simpler carving of the iris desk. Troccoli was prob- ably the carver behind the dramatic linen presses with tulip-poplar and sassafras designs by Edna Walker located in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walker’s known furniture designs are densely packed with botanical elements, like carpets of gracefully flattened leaves and flowers, and are considerably more abstract than Steele’s.28

Another three-part furniture design in the exhibition is an expansive charcoal and watercolor drawing depicting four crows (fig. 9), which, the inscription tells us, was intended for a low-relief carving. Open to full wingspan, the majestic crows are cropped in arbitrary, asymmetrical ways by the vertical divisions between the three panels. The drawing’s size tells us that Steele intended it as a to-scale template for the carvers to work from. Yet at nearly six feet wide, the crow design is much bigger than the linen presses, chests, or desks often appointed with inset paintings or carvings such as this. The penciled spacers of the crow drawing suggest it was for a piece with doors, perhaps a low sideboard similar to one located in the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild’s conference room.

Typical of Byrdcliffe design, a continuous narrative allows the fragmented birds to coalesce in the invisible space behind the panel divisions, while pine branches29 occupy an additional plane of botanical décor. They are, again, arranged diagonally, providing a dynamic surface backdrop to the crows. The work is unusual because of the animal factor, with Byrdcliffe furniture design known largely for the botanical ornament favored by the Whiteheads. Antiquarian Robert Edwards mentions another bird design by Zulma Steele, “a huge black raven dropping into the upper panel of a desk like an ominous shadow.” It is unclear which drawing he is referencing. The Guild has several drawings by Zulma Steele of birds for furniture design, yet none matches his description.30 But how did birds come to roost in the otherwise flora-centric, scenery-based ornamentation at Byrdcliffe? They are certainly the most common animal motif in William Morris’s stylized botanicals, while Ralph Whitehead seemed to like both birds and angels. Love, he wrote in the epigraph to Grass of the Desert, was half of each of those beings, and in an essay called “Modern Painters” (after Ruskin), he associates birds with the human soul.31 Heidi Nasstrom Evans tells us that Jane Whitehead designed the symbol on the cover of Grass of the Desert, 32 a highly stylized bird, mostly wing, carrying an arrow as more birds fly into the distance. The same stylized bird is intertwined with a fleur-de-lis on the title page. The Whiteheads followed this up in 1902 with another collaboration, a book of plates about the angel in art called Birds of God 33

And then, of course, there’s the fact that Jane Whitehead’s middle name was Byrd, and the colony hence named “Byrdcliffe”—her middle name combined with Mr. Whitehead’s, Radcliffe. This might have been a compelling reason to use a bird as part of any marketing identity for the crafts produced at the colony. Indeed, the stamp of the Byrdcliffe Pottery, which operated from 1903 to 1922, consists of stylized bird or angel wings.34 But the arrows and bird fragments are esoteric and heavyhanded—and the most enduring Byrdcliffe logo became, instead, the lily.

The Whiteheads’ emotional attachment to the lily perhaps originated with the fleur-de-lis crest of the city of Florence, one of many stops on their year-long honey- moon, and a symbol they used frequently in their home décor, book designs, and more.35 Zulma Steele’s iconic hand-colored woodblock design of a lily (fig. 10) shows a vertical stalk bifurcating into two lily blooms, one open, one closed. More rigid, stylized variants of the lily decorate Steele’s table legs, chests, chair splats, and a unique footstool in the collection of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum. The single lily of Steele’s woodcut was modified and contained within an octagon for the company furniture stamp, found on many pieces produced at Byrdcliffe in 1904. The lily also embellished Whitehead’s calling card.36

From her innovative three-paneled ornamentation and application of English Arts and Crafts stylistic priorities to Byrdcliffe furniture, to the graphic adaptation of her lily into Byrdcliffe’s company identity, and finally to the lily’s continued resonance in merchandise and marketing at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild today, Zulma Steele can be credited with nothing short of creating the Byrdcliffe brand. Ralph Whitehead, however, lacked the agency and financial incentive to figure out precisely how to work that brand into the public consciousness, and with nary a fight was overshadowed by the Arts and Crafts furniture production and promotional savvy of Gustav Stickley and, to a lesser degree, Elbert Hubbard of Roycroft 37 But that is another story, one very much at the root of why Byrdcliffe produced fewer than sixty pieces of furniture before shutting down the woodshop for good—a short chapter in Byrdcliffe’s long history.

Without the explanatory letters, treatises, or journals so coveted by art historians, we need to rely on Steele’s visual expression to determine that she was studying, or at the very least paying close attention to, William Morris’s Arts and Crafts design principles. Ralph Whitehead’s library of over 5,000 volumes was available to Byrdcliffe residents and was well-stocked with books on design.38 A 1908 photograph (fig. 11) shows a Morris tapestry hanging in the library, its pre-Raphaelite female figure presiding over the volumes, reminding readers of the utopian colony’s debt to this luminary of the Arts and Crafts movement.39 It must have been in Whitehead’s library, in part, that Steele derived some of the methods and motivations she took into her studio practice. No documentation points to her having ever received formal training in furniture design;40 and she developed a style that was at once her own and redolent of influence.

The final work by Zulma Steele to be studied here, her Hanging Shelf with Poppy Design (figs. 12 and 13), also from 1904, is a beautiful assimilation of conventionalized botanical imagery, Art Nouveau, and the romance of medievalizing books printed at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, editions of which populated Whitehead’s impressive library.41 Mirrored forms of poppy flowers create ornate arabesques at each end of the shelf, with curling diagonal stems, tendrils, and flame-like leaves that read in a distinctly typographic way. The plants completely fill the shelf’s vertical panels, edge to edge, enclosed like ornate capital initials in an early manuscript. One of Steele’s notebooks has a page of medieval lettering exper- iments, including an elaborate “ZS” monogram.42 The yellow background of the poppy underscores associations with the gold leaf of illuminated manuscripts.

Morris created three typefaces for Kelmscott’s sumptuously designed books, with capital letters festooned in spiky leaves and vines,43 common enough in type design. Yet Steele’s visits to Whitehead’s library would have been incomplete without perusing Morris’s illustrious handmade editions. The quintessentially Art Nouveau whiplash form of the poppy (which Byrdcliffe furniture designer Dawson-Dawson Watson also employed), the fully conventionalized treatment of the plants, and their allusions to an ornate typeface make Steele’s hanging cabinet a paean to the interdisciplinary design languages of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Two paintings and a ceramic bowl with decorative botanical border designs in the current exhibition demonstrate that Steele’s interest in the visual tactics of furniture decoration lingered long after the Bottega stopped production. Steele’s designs align the furniture produced at Byrdcliffe more closely with the English Arts and Crafts as represented by Morris (and as channeled through Ralph Whitehead’s own Englishness) than with the austere, representation-free designs of nearby makers Roycroft and Stickley—the latter a high-performing business that has become synonymous with American Arts and Crafts. Perhaps the American public was not ready for pictorial representation on furniture, with plants prominently growing across their desks and sideboards. Steele’s and Walker’s designs were undoubtedly quite radical. Steele was a thinker who learned from close study of nature and design, and explored new topics, media, and styles. A series of large paintings of the Ashokan Reservoir highlight her strengths as a landscape painter; travels to Haiti and the Bahamas resulted in sensitive human studies; the 1913 Armory Show and painting instruction in France brought her in touch with European modernism; and, after 1922, she turned to producing ceramics in what used to be the Byrdcliffe Pottery.44 In 1939, she became a founding member and first chairperson of the Woodstock Guild of Craftsmen,45 established to give creators in the decorative arts an exhibition forum. When, in 1975, the Whiteheads’ son bequeathed the Byrdcliffe Art Colony to the Guild of Craftsmen (founded by women, it should be noted), the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild was formed, today an important site for artists’ residencies, exhibitions, classes, and more. Steele died three years after the merger, at the age of ninety-eight. Without having planned it this way, she had founded the organization that went on to protect her original Woodstock home, the artists’ colony in which she came into her own.

Notes

1 Robert Edwards, “Byrdcliffe Furniture: Imagination Versus Reality,” in Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2004), 74. Edwards’s essay remains the most comprehensive examination of furniture production at Byrdcliffe. Any signed Byrdcliffe furniture has the date 1904. Edwards, 81.

2 See, for example, a Zulma Steele poplar chest (carving attributed to G. B. Troccoli) in the Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection Inc. (L1993.5.1); and an identically styled chest with painted landscape panels likely by Dawson Dawson-Watson or Victor Anderson in the Two Red Roses Foundation, Palm Harbor, FL.

3 Edwards notes that Byrdcliffe linen presses have a direct prototype in M. H. Baillie Scott’s “clothes press,” published in International Studio in 1898. Edwards, 78.

4 Ibid., 83.

5 William Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” Lecture, Working Men’s College, London, 1881 (London: Longmans & Co., 1899), 4. Emphasis mine.

6 Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, “Work,” in Grass of the Desert (London: Chiswick Press, 1892), 171.

7 See William Morris’s lectures “The Lesser Arts” and “Art for the People” for impassioned arguments about the relationship between happiness in labor (artistic and otherwise) and positive social change. William Morris, Some Hopes and Fears for Art (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 1–37 and 38–70.

8 Zulma Steele and Edna Walker have variously been called companions, roommates, fellow Pratt students, and friends. They lived together at Byrdcliffe for at least seventeen years and shared a studio in New York City during the winter. Various accounts exist but Walker is said to have gone to Scotland sometime around 1920 and was never heard from again; Woodstock writer Tad Wise proposes otherwise. In 1926, at the age of 45, Steele married Neilson Parker, her first marriage; Parker died two years later and Steele never remarried. While finding verifiable evidence of a romantic relationship between Zulma Steele and Edna Walker is highly unlikely given the climate of secrecy around homosexuality in the early twentieth century, it is also unlikely that two women would live together for as long as Steele and Walker did without some kind of conjugal bond in place. Edna Walker is not mentioned in the one biographical document we have written by Steele (Archives of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum). Tad Wise was recently the first writer to directly address the question of Steele and Walker’s probable relationship, with some creative conjecture. See Tad Wise, “Gender Blending in Early Woodstock and Our First Female Genius,” Woodstock Times (August 26 and Sept. 5, 2018), https://hudsonvalleyone. com/2018/08/26/gender-blending-in-early-woodstockour-first-female-genius/. Accessed May 27, 2020.

9 Alf Evers, Woodstock: History of An American Town (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1987), 427–428.

10 Tom Wolf, “Art at Byrdcliffe,” in Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 97–98. Dr. Wolf’s many years of research on Byrdcliffe have produced an encyclopedic resource for scholars. Murphy was the first painter hired by Whitehead to teach at Byrdcliffe, where he spent the summers of 1903–1905. He returned to his home state of Massachusetts and established the famed Carig-Rohane frame shop in Boston with Charles Prendergast, brother of the better-known painter Maurice Prendergast.

11 From a one-page autobiographical document in the archives of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum.

12 Edwards, 77.

13 Thomas A. Guiler, “The Bottega,” UpstateHistorical accessed May 25, 2020, http://www.upstatehistorical.org/items/ show/6. Guiler’s website includes an interactive tour of the Byrdcliffe Art Colony and is an important scholarly resource.

14 Edwards, 77.

15 Evers, 424.

16 Guiler, “The Bottega.” Jane Whitehead is quoted by Ben Webster: “Oh, that’s a little too dark a green. I’m afraid that you’re going to have to sand-paper that down.”

17 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (AC1993.176.15.1), Drop-Front Desk, c. 1904. Oak, paint, and brass hardware, 51¾ x 44½ x 16¾ in. Byrdcliffe metalworker Edward Thatcher created the brass strap hinges.

18 Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” 35.

19 A substantial portion of WBG’s permanent collection can be viewed at: https://collections.hvvacc.org/digital/collection/wbg1.

20 Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” 6.

21 A chest with two painted panels attributed to George William Eggers also uses this device of a continuous landscape. Collection of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild (WBG 2015.001.005).

22 William Morris, “Making the Best of It,” in Some Hopes and Fears for Art, 151.

23 Drawing from nature is elemental to Ruskin’s ideas on art. His commentary on the decorative use of natural forms— in which nature by necessity dictates design—can be seen, for example, in John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: George Allen, 1903), 139. Elsewhere, in a lecture transcript, he wittily describes the ways in which conventionalized forms test the skill of a designer: “Whenever you want to know whether you have got any real power of composition or adaption in ornament, don’t be content with sticking leaves together by the ends—anybody can do that—but try to conventionalise a butcher’s or a greengrocer’s with Saturday night customers buying cabbage and beef. That will tell you if you can design or not.” John Ruskin, “John Ruskin on Decorative Art,” The Decorator and Furnisher 15, 1 (Oct. 1889), 15.

24 Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” 16–17.

25 WBG 2003.004.052, Untitled (Apple blossoms or pink dogwood). Watercolor, ink and pencil, 19½ x 25¾ inches.

26 A similar iris design, this time in one panel, can be found in a hanging wall cabinet, approximately 40 inches wide, by Zulma Steele housed at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (90-40).

27 Nancy E. Green, “Cast of Characters,” in Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 243.

28 Designs by Edna Walker include Metropolitan Museum of Art (1991.311.1), Linen Press with Sassafrass Design and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2003.61), Linen Press with Tulip-Poplar Leaves, 1904.

29 WBG owns three preparatory graphite drawings of a possibly related pine triptych, approximately 11 x 18 inches each.

WBG 2003.004.038, 2003.004.042, and 2003.004.043

30 WBG 2003.004.040 (Crane), WBG 2003.004.041 (Four

Studies of a Bird) and WBG 2003.004.032 (Bird with Spread Wings). None of these have the “dramatic, foreboding” qualities referenced by Edwards, 77.

31 Whitehead, Grass of the Desert, epigraph, 115, 117.

32 Heidi Nasstrom Evans, “Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead’s (1861-1955) Idealized Visions About Simple Living and Arts and Crafts,” brochure essay published with exhibition of the same name, Georgia Museum of Art October 9–December 5, 2004. Reprinted at http://www.tfaoi.com/ aa/5aa/5aa36.htm.

33 Jane Whitehead and Ralph Whitehead, Birds of God: Angels and Sundry Imaginative Figures from the Pictures of the Masters of the Renaissance (New York, R.H. Russell, 1902).

34 See Ellen Paul Denker, “Purely for Pleasure: Ceramics at Byrdcliffe,” in Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 108–119.

35 Evans, n.p.

36 The Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Collection 209. See http:// www.upstatehistorical.org/files/show/23.

37 For a description of furniture marketing, or its lack, at Byrdcliffe, see Edwards 74–75. For an examination of the three lesser-known arts and crafts colonies in the age of Stickley—Byrdcliffe, Rose Valley, and Roycroft—see Thomas A. Guiler, “The Handcrafted Utopia: Arts and Crafts Communities in America’s Progressive Era” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 2016).

38 Thomas A. Guiler, “Winterthur Primer: The Byrdcliffe Library,” InCollect, https://www.incollect.com/articles/winterthur-primer-the-byrdcliffe-library. Accessed May 26, 2020.

39 Whitehead purchased the tapestry in the 1890s. Nancy Green, “The Reality of Beauty,” in Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 47.

40 Edwards, 83.

41 Guiler, “Byrdcliffe Primer.”

42 Loose sheet with ink and graphite lettering in notebook, 6¾ x 8¼ inches, signed Zulma R. Steele on cover. Collection of Janet Marsh Hunt. Thanks to the lender for allowing us to bring these notebooks to light, and to Tom Wolf for sharing his research into the collection.

43 For information on the most famous Kelmscott publication, the works of Chaucer with woodblock illustrations by famed painter Edward Burne-Jones, see https://www.bl.uk/ collection-items/the-kelmscott-chaucer. For the full alphabets of Morris’s typefaces, see this excellent resource by a computer science professor and self-professed typography nerd: http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-24795.html.

44 Denker, 108.

45 Michael Perkins, with a foreword by Alf Evers, The Woodstock Guild and its Byrdcliffe Art Colony: A Brief Guide (Woodstock: The Woodstock Guild, 1991), 45.