Editor's note: The following essay was reprinted November 2, 2004 in Resource Library with permission of the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. The essay is contained in a brochure which was published in connection with an exhibit of the same name being held at the Georgia Museum of Art October 9-December 5, 2004. We express appreciation to Bonnie Ramsey of the Georgia Museum of Art for bringing the essay to our attention. If you have questions or comments regarding the essay, or wish to purchase a copy of the brochure please contact the Georgia Museum of Art directly through either this phone number or web address:
Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead's (1861-1955) Idealized Visions About Simple Living and Arts and Crafts
by Heidi Nasstrom Evans
Notes:
1. Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead, 2-3 April 1891. Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 7, Folder 1, Letters from Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead and Family, 1891-1895. Many thanks to all the people who supported this project: Ashley Callahan, William U. Eiland, Dennis Harper, Tricia Miller, Rebecca Yates, Jill and Mark Willcox Jr., Doug and Hanna Grace Evans, Jeanne Solensky, Rich McKinstry, Laura Parrish, Carla Smith, Mark Taylor, Bill Shea, Mary Corbin Sies, Doug James, Nancy Green, Andrea Potochniak, Alan Crawford, Cindy Williams, Ashley Lockwood, Allie Farlowe, and Ana Lopez. I would especially like to thank Robert Edwards for his intellectual and aesthetic insights, candor, and collegial spirit.
2. Tom Wolf describes the Whitehead's Sloyd school for manual arts in "Byrdcliffe's History: Industrial Revolution" (Nancy Green, et al, Byrdcliffe An American Arts and Crafts Colony, Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, 2004: 19. Wolf says the Sloyd method is a "Swedish technique" which "emphasized manual training [that] spread through Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century."
3. Wording in quotations is from David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 131.
4. In the author's experience, studio cards often feature professionally taken photographic portraits. Among the uppermost social class to which Whitehead belonged, these cards were traded among friends and lovers, given as remembrances of fond acquaintances, and bestowed by celebrated individuals. They usually feature the name and location of the photographic studio where the portrait was taken and often are inscribed on the back by the person pictured on the front, who was addressing the individual to whom she or he was giving the studio card.
5. Historian Alan Crawford shared this passage from Ruskin's chapter on "The Lamp of Sacrifice" within The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; repr. London: Everyman's Library, 1956), 17-18. Crawford importantly notes that the context for this passage is not about the simple life per se; Rather, it is about the virtue of putting rich materials into a church. Alan Crawford, e-mail to author, 9 July 2004.
6. The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters and poets formed around John Ruskin at Oxford and included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, who collaborated with William Morris on arts and crafts. Both Rossetti and Burne-Jones painted idealized women often dressed in Arthurian-style or early Renaissance-style clothing similar to that worn by Whitehead in figures 2 and 5.
7. Whitehead's 1892 calendar describes painting lessons with "Miss Mercier." Given the time and place of her study, the similarity to Miss Mercie's name, and other misspellings in Whitehead's calendars, it is possible that Whitehead studied with the French academic painter Miss Mercie. Gabriel Weisberg, e-mail correspondence with author, 2 December 2003.
8. These drawings are illustrated in Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 214, 220.
9. Robert Edwards describes the panel in "Byrdcliffe: Life By Design," in Life By Design: The Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony (Wilmington, Delaware: Delaware Art Museum, 1984), 4. He believes it may have been decorated using pyrography, a technique in which ornament is burned into the surface of wood using a tool similar to a soldering iron. Robert Edwards, e-mail correspondence with author, 3 August 2004. The panel or a copy of it is in the collection of the Byrdcliffe Art Colony of The Woodstock Guild.
10. Franne at The Woodstock Guild, e-mail correspondence with author, 2 May 2003.
11. Robert Edwards, "Byrdcliffe Furniture: Imagination Versus Reality," in Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 84.
12. Ralph Whitehead, Grass of the Desert (London: Chiswick Press, 1892), 115, quoted in Robert Edwards, "Byrdcliffe: Life By Design," 3.
13. David Shi, The Simple Life: 131-132. In this passage, Shi quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Plato," The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., Boston, 1903-1904, 4: 53-58; "The Conduct of Life," ibid., 6:89, 134; "Society and Solitude," ibid., 7:116.
14. Jane Whitehead to Jane Byrd Mercer McCall, 20 April 1896, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 7, Folder 2, Letters from Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead and Family, 1896-1897.
15. Charles Keeler, The Simple Home (1906), reprint on www.oregoncoast.net/simplehome.html, accessed 4 July 2004, 3 of 32.
16. According to Robert Edwards, the studio pictured in figure 7 could have been in Italy or California. Cheryl Robertson contends that Jane Whitehead is shown "at an easel in an Arcady studio" In this photograph. Robert Edwards, e-mail correspondence with author, 3 August 2004. Ralph Whitehead refers to Jane Whitehead as the "poet painter of whatever I and she lives in" in a letter dated 6 December 1892. Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 1, Folder 4, Letters from Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead and Family.
17. Cynthia Field, Amy Ballard, and Robert Orr, "The Historic Interior Spaces of Barney Studio House," Application for Historic Landmark, 16 May 1994, 11. For more on the studio-salon, see John Milner, The Studios of Paris: The Capital of Art in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Whitehead's cousin William Mercer had a studio named Aldie which looked similar to Whitehead's main studio in Arcady. Both followed the studio-salon model described in this essay. Aldie was published in the October 1903 issue of House and Garden. Cheryl Robertson describes similarities between Whitehead's studio and Mercer's Aldie in "Nature and Artifice in the Architecture of Byrdcliffe," in Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 149.
18. Jane Whitehead to Jane Byrd Mercer McCall, n.d, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 7, Folder 1, Letters from Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead and Family, 1891-1895.
19. In "Nature and Artifice in the Architecture of Byrdcliffe," Cheryl Robertson identifies the textile hanging from the stair-rail of Whitehead's studio as a "Voysey-designed 'Tulip' textile" (Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 149).
20. Jane Whitehead to Jane Byrd Mercer McCall, n.d., Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 7, Folder 1, Letters from Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead and Family, 1891-1895.
21. Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead, 14 July 1900, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 7, Folder 3, Letters from Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead and Family, 1900-1901.
22. John Burroughs to "My Dear Friend" [identity unknown] from West Point, n.d., Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, quoted in Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 225.
23. It is commonly believed that Jessie Tarbox Beals took the Byrdcliffe pictures in 1908. If the 1907 date of the Byrdcliffe prospectus is accurate, it suggests that Beals's photos were taken earlier than 1908. This author accessed the prospectus at the Woodstock public library.
24. The date of this drawing is based on Jane Whitehead's 8 January 1903 calendar entry: "At work. 5 pastel interiors."
25. See Jane Whitehead's 1903 calendar, 8 January 1903 entry, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series IX, Box 1, Folder 5.
26. See architectural drawings (92x39.1140.85, .89) in Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series I, Box 4, Folder 6.
27. Ralph Whitehead to Jane Whitehead, 1 February 1903, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 3, Folder 4, Letters from Whitehead to Byrd and Family, 1903.
28. Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead, n.d., Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur, Byrdcliffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 8, Folder 1, Letters from Byrd to Whitehead, undated. A pastel interior of Mackie's room at White Pines is in the Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdcliffe Collection. It and a design for a White Pines hallway are illustrated in Cheryl Robertson, "Nature and Artifice in the Architecture of Byrdcliffe," figure 11, page 13, and figure 33, page 150, respectively.
29. For more on White Pines Pottery, see most recently, Ellen Denker's "Purely for Pleasure: Ceramics at Byrdcliffe," in Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 108-119; and Jane Perkins Claney's seminal "White Pines Pottery; the continuing arts and crafts experiment," in Life By Design: The Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1984), 15-20.
30 A drawing (92x39.1505) in the Joseph Downs Collection at Winterthur is by Jane Whitehead and illustrates the design process she underwent in the development of the White Pines Pottery label. It is reproduced in this author's essay in Nancy Green et al., Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony, 70. Ellen Denker, "Purely for Pleasure: Ceramics at Byrdcliffe," 116.
31. Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead, 2-3 April 1891. Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum, Byrdlciffe Collection, Series VIII, Box 8, Folder 1, Letters from Jane Whitehead to Ralph Whitehead.
32. Ibid.
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