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(b Ellisburg, NY, 1859; d Burlingame, CA, Jan 21, 1896).

American architect. Despite his tragically brief career and six Neo-classical buildings, A. Page Brown will be remembered for his Ferry Building, the centerpiece of San Francisco’s waterfront; that city’s Swedenborgian Church with its Mission-style chairs, both icons of the American Arts and Crafts Movement; and his Mission-style California building for the 1893 Chicago Exposition, a structure that helped establish Mission and Mediterranean styles as appropriate for both domestic and commercial designs throughout the Southwest.

After briefly attending Cornell University, Brown spent three years with the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. By December 1884, after two years studying European architecture, he opened his own New York practice. Commissions in San Francisco from the Crocker family in 1889 led him to open a West Coast office. He supervised the completion of the first Grace Cathedral (1890, replaced), designed the city’s second skyscraper and, in February 1892, his Mission Revival style design won the competition for the California State Building for the ...

American architectural partnership formed in 1893 by Charles (Sumner) Greene (b Brighton, OH, 12 Oct 1868; d Carmel, CA, 11 June 1957) and his brother Henry (Mather) Greene (b Brighton, OH, 23 Jan 1870; d Pasadena, CA, 2 Oct 1954). Both studied at the Manual Training School of Washington University, St Louis, MO, Charles entering in 1883 and Henry in 1884. There they were not only taught woodworking and carpentry but were introduced to the ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris, to which the school strongly adhered. In 1888 they entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. On completion of the two-year architectural course, Henry entered the office of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge in Boston, MA, and Charles became a draughtsman with H. Langford Warren. Later Henry worked in the office of Chamberlin & Austin, and Charles with Winslow & Wetherell.

In the early 1890s the Greenes’ parents moved to Pasadena, CA, and suggested that their sons join them in the new and developing city, which they did in ...

(b Stockbridge, MA, 1866; d Santa Barbara, CA, June 17, 1915).

American architect. After graduating from Harvard University, he studied with the Boston firm of Andrews & Jacques (1889–91) and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1892–4), Paris. On returning to the USA, he began his practice in Chicago, where he received various commissions for residential buildings. A representative example is the house (c. 1900) of Edwin S. Fechheimer, Winnetka, IL. This wood-shingled house exhibits flowing interior spaces and an interest in the natural colours and textures of building materials. The subtle contrasts of lightly stained pine beams and panels of coarse beige canvas placed between them provide a sophisticated backdrop for the handmade furniture, pottery and brass decorations, the total ensemble being a collaboration between architect and client. The interior and its contents reflect Higginson’s involvement in the Arts and Crafts Movement. In 1905 he moved to Montecito, CA, and worked in the Santa Barbara area until his death. He built several houses there in the Arts and Crafts style, including the Higginson House (...

(b Bloomington, IL, June 19, 1856; d SS Lusitania, off Co. Cork, May 7, 1915).

American designer. He was initially a successful salesman for the Illinois-based Weller’s Practical Soaps. He settled in East Aurora, near Buffalo, NY, and abandoned selling soap in 1893. During a trip to England the following year, he met William Morris and admired the works of his Kelmscott Press. On returning to East Aurora, Hubbard employed his great showmanship to popularize a simplified version of English Arts and Crafts design for a wide audience. With the help of a local press, he began publishing monthly biographies, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great (1895–1909), the first two of which treat the lives of George Eliot and John Ruskin. Soon after, he founded the Roycroft Press with the publication of The Philistine (1895–1915), a monthly journal combining popular philosophy, aphorisms and brief preachments with crude Art Nouveau lettering and ornament. The Song of Songs (1895), printed on handmade paper with rough and arty bindings, was the first of many Roycroft books. The press became the centre of the ...

(b Markesan, WI, Oct 1, 1860; d San Francisco, CA, Feb 19, 1945).

American painter, designer, and teacher. First trained by his architect father, he worked as a freelance illustrator before deciding in 1885 to study painting in Paris. He spent about 15 months at the Académie Julian and exhibited at three Salons before returning to California in 1889. He soon began teaching at the California School of Design (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and in 1896 was promoted to Director. During his 16-year tenure, Mathews reformed the curriculum in line with academic practice in Paris and New York and exerted a powerful influence over hundreds of students. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, Mathews left the school, aligning himself with artists, architects, and businessmen eager to rebuild San Francisco. With his wife (and former student), Lucia Kleinhans Mathews (1870–1955), and a partner, John Zeile, he embarked on several ventures: the magazine Philopolis (1906–16) emphasized art and city planning; the Philopolis Press (...

(b Salem, OH, Feb 2, 1867; d Farmington, CT, Aug 30, 1946).

American architect, daughter of Alfred Atmore Pope. At the age of 20 she embarked on a ‘grand tour’ of Europe, after which she pursued studies in art and architecture at Princeton University. She became notable as the first woman architect in the USA. She designed her family home, Hill-Stead (1898–1901), in Farmington, CT, influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement, in cooperation with the architect Stanford White. In 1907 she was commissioned by her teacher Mary Hilliard to design the main school building of Westover School for Girls, Middlebury, CT. In this building (completed 1912) she included such innovative facilities as the first all-electric institutional kitchen with a built-in vacuum system. Other projects included the Joseph P. Chamberlain Estate (1915), Middlebury, CT, and three double cottages as workers’ housing in Farmington (1916). She worked actively on issues including education and women’s rights, and travelled widely, surviving the sinking of the ...

(b St Johns, Nfld, Canada, May 27, 1863; d Westport, CT, Aug 20, 1948).

American craftsman, frame-maker and painter; brother of Maurice Prendergast. Charles Prendergast created whimsical gilded art objects that transcend ordinary classification. Along with his older brother, the painter Maurice Prendergast, Charles Prendergast played an important role in the development of modern art in Boston and New York. In addition to his active participation in artist-organized exhibitions and societies, his own work helped to set the standard for movements such as the Arts and Crafts style of the late 19th century to the non-Western and folk primitivism of the early 20th.

Born to a Canadian father and American mother, Charles was five years old when the family moved from St Johns to his mother’s home town of Boston. After he finished his schooling at the age of 14, he gravitated toward the arts and became one of Boston’s most prominent makers of hand-crafted frames, founding the Carrig-Rohane workshop with Herman Dudley Murphy in ...

(b Wallingford, PA, Nov 1861; d Rose Valley, PA, Oct 15, 1916).

American architect, writer, and designer. Born into a Quaker family and trained in Quaker schools, he studied architecture in the office of Quaker Addison Hutton (1834–1916), and then in the office of Frank Furness, where he was exposed to the ideas that reshaped American modernism at the end of the century. For a time in the 1890s he was drawn to the historicism of Richard Morris Hunt, producing imposing Gothic piles for the children of the Philadelphia industrialists who had commissioned Furness’s ahistorical houses in the previous generation. By 1900, in response to the ideas of the utopian American economist Henry George (1839–97) and William Morris, Price founded two utopian communities: a Single-Tax colony at Arden (1896), DE, and an Arts and Crafts commune at Rose Valley (1901), PA, where he lived until his death. There he developed a regional domestic architectural style that incorporated stucco, local stone, and tile in gable-roofed houses that evoked the local agrarian architecture, but with an abstract directness resulting from the merger of modern form with traditional materials....

(b Osceola, WI, March 9, 1858; d Syracuse, NY, April 20, 1942).

American designer and publisher. During most of the period 1875–99, he worked in various family-owned furniture-manufacturing businesses around Binghamton, NY. He travelled to Europe in the 1890s, seeing work by Arts and Crafts designers. In 1898 he established the Gustave Stickley Company in Eastwood, a suburb of Syracuse, NY. The following year he introduced his unornamented, rectilinear Craftsman furniture inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris. He adopted a William Morris motto, ‘Als ik kan’ (‘If I can’), as his own and used the symbol of a medieval joiner’s compass as his trademark. In 1903 he dropped the ‘e’ in the spelling of Gustave.

Stickley published The Craftsman Magazine (1901–16), a periodical devoted to the Arts and Crafts Movement (see Craftsman Movement). The first issue was dedicated to Morris, the second to Ruskin. Most issues contained articles and illustrations of Craftsman furniture by Stickley. The periodical contained information on American and foreign designers, Japanese and Native American crafts, manual arts education, socialism, and gardens. The architect ...

(b Providence, RI, Feb 14, 1860; d Boston, MA, Dec 29, 1941).

American typographer, printer, and graphic designer. He was advertising manager and layout artist at the publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. before transferring to the firm’s printing works at the Riverside Press, where he worked until 1892. Updike’s first freelance commission, the design of a Book of Common Prayer (1892), was well received, and in 1893 he set up his own studio, initially with the idea of designing types but then as a printing press, the Merrymount Press. He commissioned a new type called Merrymount from Bertram Goodhue for use on a new Episcopalian Altar Book (Boston, 1896). Between 1893 and 1896 Updike produced c. 18 books before turning to printing them himself, assisted by John Bianchi (fl 1893–1947), his first typesetter and later his partner. The Merrymount Press undertook a wide range of work for publishers, book clubs, libraries, churches, and institutions. In ...