Candace Wheeler, Wise Woman and Muse of American
Decorative Arts
by Jane Curley
Editor's note: This issue was optically scanned and
converted to text. There may be some "hanging chads" as a result
of this process.
This summer, the Mountain Top Historical Society celebrates the life and
work of Candace Wheeler. A native of the Western Catskills, Wheeler was
a pioneer in the late nineteenth century art world. As a high priestess
of the Aesthetic Movement, she was the muse of women workers in the arts,
inspiring, training and promoting her young protégées to
become self-supporting professionals. She was also among the first to champion
native American design over European fashions. During a life that almost
spanned a century (1827-1923), Wheeler transformed herself from a simple
farm girl into a force to be reckoned with on the American art scene.
Her evolving career began with philanthropy, continued into textile design
and needlework and culminated in her appointment as a Director of the Women's
Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. As if that were not enough,
Wheeler also wrote and lectured extensively, publishing books and articles
on needlework, gardening and interior design. Further, she produced a charming
autobiography and a volume of fairy tales featuring her grandchildren.
With her brother Frank she founded the Onteora colony in the e Catskills,
one of the earliest summer retreats for artists and writers. And
the beauty was that she managed all this in an era when women's work was
almost entirely confined to the house.
Born in 1827 in the little farm town of Delhi; this wonder woman was
one of eight children. Wheeler described the household in which she grew
up as "puritan". Indeed, with her deeply religious, abolitionist
father Abner Thurber and her Roman Senator of a mother, Wheeler learned
early that "domestic life was women's kingdom and needlework was one of
its chief conditions. Needlework was far more than an interest, it was
an occupation." This austere environment, where the Bible and its commentaries
were the only reading and in which Wheeler's first "notions of pictorial
art came from cross-stitch illustrations"' might have been stony soil for
the development of Wheeler’s creativity. Surprisingly, the extraordinary
work ethic set by her father and the strong foundation in domestic arts
provided by her mother, formed a solid foundation for her future career.
As she came of age, Wheeler observed that "in the country town where
I grew up there were no girls of fortune and none who were self-supporting.
There were one or two elderly single women who 'helped themselves' by school-teaching
or giving inadequate lessons upon the piano, and these pursuits were the
only two open to unmarried women. The career of a powerful and competent
single woman, as we know it today, was an unheralded dream." Marriage was
a young girl's only way forward and in 1844 Candace Thurber married Tom
Wheeler, a businessman of New York. It was he who provided her with a more
worldly education, introducing her to the artists and writers of the city,
taking her to concerts and plays. For more than twenty years, Wheeler led
the typical life of a Victorian married woman, raising her four children,
building a house in Roslyn, LI, and planting a garden, one of her lifelong
delights.
While her children grew, Wheeler's passion for art grew also. Having
artists in her circle was not enough: she must learn to paint and she traveled
in Europe to study art in Dresden, France and Italy. But it was a family
tragedy that launched her into the first phase of her public working life.
In 1876, her beloved daughter Candace died. Giving in to grief was not
an option for Wheeler. Instead, with the fortitude instilled in childhood,
she "improved" upon her sorrow. Wheeler galvanized herself out of a comfortable
middle-class existence and focused her efforts on helping women in need.
Many women in the nineteenth century found an outlet for their energy in
promoting work~, but few had so far-reaching an effect as did Candace Wheeler.
The catalyst for her debut was a show of needlework exhibited by the
Kensington School at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. This was ~h English
Arts and Crafts revival of embroidery techniques aimed at providing suitable
work for 11decayed gentlewomen", in other words, women who had to support
themselves. This display inspired Wheeler to found an American school of
needlecraft to benefit the "many unhappy and apparently helpless women,
dependent upon kin who had their own especial responsibilities and burdens".
With a committee of powerful society ladies behind her and a number of
artist friends as advisors, Wheeler opened the Decorative Arts Society
the following year, 1877. Art and beauty combined with practicality, giving
women the opportunity for self-support: that was the Candace Wheeler motto.
A howling success, Wheeler's Society boasted thirty branches across America
within a year. Yet Wheeler was not satisfied In 1879, she founded a second
society, The Women's Exchange, in order to fill the perceived needs of
those women whose talents lay not in the arts but in other practical productions.
Not one to rest on her laurels~ Wheeler next parlayed her reputation
as America's expert on needlework into a partnership with Louis Comfort
Tiffany. Their firm, The Associated Artists, was the first decorative arts
company of its kind in America. For the four years of its existence (1879-1883),
the AA captured such plum projects as the redecoration of the White House,
Mark Twain's home in Hartford, The Seventh Regiment Armory, plus a host
of houses for the wildly well-to-do of New York. Members of the firm, including
Sam Colman and Lockwood de Forest, each had a special area of expertise
in which they operated independently as well as collaborated with Tiffany,
the premiere talent of the group. Wheeler and her young protégées,
her daughter Dora and Rosina Emmet, designed and executed many of the firm's
sumptuous fabrics. Their Fourth Avenue work room was another of Wheeler's
seed beds, a hot house like her Society of Decorative Arts, in which she
nurtured young women artists, ensuring that they received professional
training and experience. And it was this opening up of the art world to
young women that is arguably Wheeler's greatest legacy.
After the break-up of the firm in 1 883, Wheeler forged on with her
own Associated Artists, an all-women enterprise in a brownstone on Twenty
Third St. Wheeler's working salon acted as a magnet for the artistic talent
of the day. Visitors and customers included Oscar Wilde, Lily Langtry,
Mark Twain and Singer Sargent. While Wheeler made much of her famous acquaintances,
her heart still went out to "the wants and needs of our little-sisters-of-the-world",
as she called them. Her mission, ever unchanged, was to spread the message
of "women's awakening to the duty of self-help." It was to them she spoke
in her lectures and articles, it was they whom she educated in her books
on rug-making, needlework and interior design, which she published during
the long twilight of her life. In 1 893, at the age of sixty-six, Wheeler's
career peaked in her oversight of the decoration of the Women's Building
at the Chicago World's Fair. There she showcased the talents of women artists
from all over the world, giving pride of place to her beloved-American
girls, who painted the building's murals.
Her firm provided a large needlewoven tapestry and fabrics and furniture
as well.
As if this were not enough, Wheeler managed to find time to found a
community in Tannersville, NY, not thirty miles from where she was born.
She and her younger brother Frank, a hugely successful wholesale grocer
in New York, were on the cutting edge of change, when in 1887 they created
a summer colony for their artist and writer friends. With the railroads
expanding their lines virtually everywhere, the Catskills, "an almost unknown
realm of beauty"' were for the first time a reasonable journey from New
York. Onteora "the outcome of all I had learned and experienced in the
first half of my life," was Wheeler's antidote to civilization, her "earth-cure",
as she called it, "for I have found that if we come close to the ground,
real worries disappear." Wheeler was "the presiding genius" of this rustic
Eden, building cottages, laying out trails and organizing picnics and pageants
to amuse her family and friends. When the community grew beyond her control,
Wheeler had to be restrained by her family from founding a rival "junior
Onteora" down the hill. Instead, she satisfied her passion for cottage
construction and gardening by building a winter home for herself in Thomasville,
Georgia, at the age of eighty.
Candace Wheeler lived to see the dawn of the Jazz Age, but her sensibility
and vision held her fast in the nineteenth century. Even as she reached
the pinnacle of her career at Chicago in 1893, the design world swept inexorably
by her. At the same time that Wheeler’s young women painted mythological
subjects and exhibited embroidered floral motifs, Louis Sullivan and Frank
Lloyd Wright were designing skyscrapers and prairie-style homes. The modern
age, with its emphasis on the machinemade, the industrial, the streamlined,
held nothing but indifference for Wheeler's carefully observed nature-based
designs. By the time the Associated Artists closed its doors in 1907, Wheeler's
reputation had diminished. Her light, which had shone the way so brightly
for young women in the 1 880s and I 890s, slowly dimmed into obscurity.
Wheeler spent her old age out of the public eye, occupied with her family,
her cottages and her gardens. Her public platform had all but disappeared,
and she died in obscurity in 1923 at the age of ninety-three.
With the passing of almost a hundred years, this new millennium gives
us the opportunity to re-examine Wheeler's life and work and to assess
her influence on her contemporaries. What impresses us most is not her
art or design skills, although her cottages are indeed charming and her
fabrics attractive. Instead, he most outstanding thing about Wheeler was
her vision and the industry with which she promoted it. 4o one worked harder
than she to attain for women he right to be self supporting and thus independent.
No one cared more about giving women the entree into the world of art,
even if it only meant showing them how to make a handsome rug or portiere.
Wheeler was no revolutionary, no suffragette on the warpath for women's
right to vote. Instead, Wheeler is perhaps best viewed as a cultivator
of the earth in which the creative power of women could grow, blossom and
bear fruit. In this light, Candace Wheeler's legacy as wise woman and muse
is an impressive one and well worth celebrating.
On October 15, 2001, an exhibition celebrating the life
and work of Candace Wheeler will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York City The show will cover every aspect of Wheeler's career and
will feature over one hundred objects: paintings, fabrics, drawings, watercolors
and/furniture, including the Metropolitan's own collect ion of Associated
Artists textiles. The exhibition, directed by Amelia Peck, Associate Curator
of Decorative Arts, will run until January 6, 2002. If will be accompanied
by a fully illustrated catalogue.
