1857-1942
Furniture Designer

The Craftsman.

Inspired by British art critic John Ruskin and British painter-designer William Morris, Gustav Stickley created a distinctly American approach to furniture design, following their call for a return to the medieval reliance on fine craftsmanship based on solid training and respect for the innate qualities of the craftsman's materials. Founding what became known as the Craftsman movement, he adapted Morris's handmade approach to creating furniture that integrated colonial, Art Nouveau, Mission, and European peasant design into an original, vigorous, straightforward style. Extensively imitated in his own time, Stickley's designs are now recognized as the embodiment of a modern American sensibility that relied primarily on function and the natural beauty of indigenous materials, rather than on design elements of the past and exotic woods.

The Stickley Brothers.

Gustav Stickley was born on 9 March 1857 in Osceola, Wisconsin, the eldest of eleven children, six...