Offered here is an excellent example of Early Mission/Arts & Craft style Oak Rocking low back Chair in excellent solid condition. The Faux Leather [Naugahyde] original seat cover is faded from age but no damages.
Pick up in San Francisco Bay Area or Buyer pays for freight shipping that I will arrange at the best possible price.
PayPal only.
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles[1] and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.[2]
Initiated in reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced,[3] the movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920. It is the root of the Modern Style, the British expression of what later came to be called the Art Nouveau movement, which it strongly influenced.[4] In Japan, it emerged in the 1920s as the Mingei movement. It stood for traditional craftsmanship, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and was anti-industrial in its orientation.[3][5] It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s,[1] and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards.[6]
Mission furniture is a style of furniture that originated in the late 19th century. It traces its origins to a chair made by A.J. Forbes around 1894 for San Francisco's Swedenborgian Church. The term mission furniture was first popularized by Joseph P. McHugh of New York, a furniture manufacturer and retailer who copied these chairs and offered a line of stylistically related furnishings by 1898. The word mission references the Spanish missions throughout colonial California, though the design of most Mission Style furniture owed little to the original furnishings of these missions. The style became increasingly popular following the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The style was popularly associated with the American Arts and Crafts movement.[1]
Mission style is a design that emphasizes simple horizontal and vertical lines and flat panels that accentuate the grain of the wood (often oak, especially quartersawn white oak). People were looking for relief after the excesses of Victorian times and the influx of mass-produced furniture from the Industrial Revolution.[2] The furniture maker Gustav Stickley produced Arts and Crafts furniture often referred to as being in the Mission Style, though Stickley dismissed the term as misleading. This was plain oak furniture that was upright, solid, and suggestive of entirely handcrafted work, though in the case of Stickley and his competitors, was constructed within a factory by both machine and handworking techniques.