Candace Wheeler

Candace Wheeler (née Thurber; March 24, 1827 – August 5, 1923), traditionally credited as the mother of interior design, was one of America's first woman interior and textile designers. She helped open the field of interior design to women, supported craftswomen, and promoted American design reform. A committed feminist, she intentionally employed women and encouraged their education, especially in the fine and applied arts, and fostered home industries for rural women. She also did editorial work and wrote several books and many articles, encompassing fiction, semi-fiction and non-fiction, for adults and children. She used her exceptional organizational skills to co-found both the Society of Decorative Art in New York City (1877) and the New York Exchange for Women's Work (1878); and she partnered with Louis Comfort Tiffany and others in designing interiors, specializing in textiles (1879-1883), then founded her own firm, The Associated Artists (1883-1907).
Throughout her long career Wheeler contributed to the Colonial Revival, the Aesthetic Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement, She was considered a national authority on home decoration, and gained widespread recognition for designing the interior of the Women's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, IL.
Biography
Candace Wheeler was born Candace Thurber on March 24, 1827, in Delhi, New York, west of the Catskill Mountains, but spent her first seven years in Oswego, New York, on Lake Ontario. Her parents were Abner Gilman Thurber (1797–1860) and Lucy (née Dunham) Thurber (1800–1892). Candace was the third born of eight siblings: Lydia Ann Thurber (1824-?), Charles Stewart Thurber (1826–1888), Horace Thurber (1828–1899), Lucy Thurber (1834–1893), Millicent Thurber (1837–1838), Abner Dunham Thurber (1839–1899), and Francis Beattie Thurber (1842–1907).
Wheeler had a happy a childhood, though she expressed annoyance at how their father raised them "a hundred years behind the time." Abner was strictly Presbyterian but also a strict abolitionist. He ensured that the family never used any product made by slaves: the family used homemade maple sugar instead of cane sugar and linen woven from flax they grew on their farm instead of southern cotton. Looking back, Candace was convinced their farm had been a stop on the underground railroad. Abner also loved nature and poetry, and shared these passions with Candace, a kindred spirit. Candace attended an "infant school" in Oswego, where at age six she stitched her first sampler. On return to Delhi she attended and graduated from the Delaware Academy.
On a trip to New York City in 1843, Candace met Thomas Mason Wheeler (1818-1895). Relatively well educated and interested in the arts, he had been a surveyor in the developing Midwest. He was the brother of the Thurbers' minister's wife, whom Candace admired as the first "cultivated" person she had known. Within a year, Tom and Candace married: he was 26, she 17. Candace's marriage and relocation to New York City upended her constrained, rural life. Tom worked for Candace's brothers' wholesale grocery business, then became a "weigher," transferring shipments in the port of New York, and eventually an owner of warehouses in Brooklyn, the Atlantic Docks, a lucrative business during the Civil War. The couple had four children:
Candace Thurber Wheeler (1845–1876), the adored firstborn who inspired some of her mothers' writing. Cannie married Lewis Atterbury Stimson (1844–1917), who became a pioneering surgeon, and was the mother of Henry L. Stimson, who became an esteemed US statesman. Cannie's and Candace's intensely loving relationship ended abruptly in 1876 when Cannie died at the age of 31. In response to the trauma of her loss, Candace dedicated the rest of her life to helping women.
James Cooper Wheeler (1849–1912), was a difficult child who caused his mother anxiety and regret throughout his life. He married Annie Morris Robinson on October 4, 1878, then abandoned her and their one child, Candace, when he moved to Australia in 1887. Their marriage was annulled in 1892. After a stint as seaman, prescribed for discipline, followed by writing for his family's trade journal, The American Grocer, Jim became a journalist and publisher in Washington State. In 1894 he married Zoe Seger, with whom he had three children. Jim wrote There She Blows! A Whaling Yarn (1909), followed by a series of books for boys set in the Pacific Northwest, and several stories and articles. Jim and his daughter Candace died in suspicious circumstances in Denver in 1912.
Dora Wheeler (1856–1940), who became an artist, trained in Paris and by William Chase in New York. She painted many portraits, and collaborated with her mother at the Associated Artists, at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, and as book designer and illustrator. She married a lawyer, Boudinot Keith (1859–1925) in 1890, with whom she had two children.
Dunham Wheeler (1861–1938) became an architect and designer. Dunham also worked at the Associated Artists, and assumed the firm's presidency from 1900 until it failed in 1907. He married Anne Quartley, who was employed at the Associated Artists. They had one child.
Wheeler died on August 5, 1923, at the age of 96.
Career
The American Grocer
Wheeler's first professional activity was writing for the American Grocer, a trade publication owned by her wholesale-grocer brothers, when edited by her husband Tom in 1874. The following year she created the "Home Department" for that journal, a pull-out section for grocers' wives and children, which she edited and to which she continued to contribute articles and semi-fiction based on her experiences to date. She hired both her son Jim, who would become a journalist and author, to write stories that reflected his stint as a mariner in the South Pacific, and her sister Lu to write articles about homemaking and home decoration, as well as humorous satires evoking their older relatives, exploiting the rural/urban tensions of the time. Much of Wheeler's life experiences before 1876, including travels abroad, may be gleaned from these early writings.
Philadelphia Centennial
In 1876, Wheeler visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. She was impressed by the Royal School of Art Needlework's elaborate display, including designs by her favorite designer, Walter Crane, as well as by an exhibit of more practical items embroidered by English women. It was not merely the artistry of the needlework that inspired her; she embraced English idea of needlework as a business that benefited women. While still in Philadelphia, Wheeler conceived of an American version of the Royal School that would include "all articles of feminine manufacture." In her opinion, this model could help "educated" but impoverished women (implying class bias). Years later, in a letter to her niece, Wheeler described herself as "jumping at the possibility of work for the army of helpless women of N.Y. who were ashamed to beg & untrained to work."
Society of Decorative Art in New York
Wheeler co-founded the Society of Decorative Art with Caroline E. Lamson (Mrs. David) Lane in New York in 1877. She hired the recently widowed Elizabeth Bacon (Mrs. General George Armstrong) Custer as secretary: the two women became fast, life-long friends. The Society was intended to help women support themselves through artistic handicrafts including needlework and other decorative arts. It served the thousands of women who were left indigent at the end of the Civil War. Wheeler called on prominent New York society matrons to support a shop in which the high-quality, custom-made goods could be sold to produce income; they had five hundred subscribers within three years.
Leading artists were hired to teach or judge exhibits at the Society in New York, including Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge. Wheeler helped to start branches in Chicago, St. Louis, Hartford, Detroit, Troy, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. Although she described resigning in a huff from the Society of Decorative Arts in 1879, she actually remained involved and supportive for the next several years.
New York Exchange for Women's Work
In 1878 Wheeler helped launch the New York Exchange for Women's Work, where women could sell any product that they could manufacture at home, including baked goods and household linens. To serve a broader range of women, no artistic ability was required. The Exchange opened in March 1878 with a consignment sale of thirty items at the home of Exchange co-founder Mary Atwater (Mrs. William) Choate. In April, the Exchange moved to a rented facility and by May it was successful enough to employ two part-time sales women. In its first year, it paid out nearly $14,000 in commissions. By 1891, there were at least 72 Exchanges across the United States. The New York Exchange continued to operate until 2003.
Tiffany & Wheeler
In 1879, Candace Wheeler and Louis Comfort Tiffany co-founded the interior-decorating firm of Tiffany & Wheeler, with Wheeler responsible for textiles. Soon they were joined by William Pringle Mitchell and Lockwood de Forest to became Louis Comfort Tiffany, Associated Artists, The firm decorated a number of significant late-19th-century houses and public buildings, including the Veterans’ Room of the Seventh Regiment Armory, the Madison Square Theatre, the Union League Club, the George Kemp house, the drawing room of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II house, and rooms of the White House in Washington, DC. Following the 20th President of United States, James Garfield's assassination, Chester Arthur, the following president, requested a redesign of the establishment before moving in. In 1882, the firm was contracted to work on several rooms, including the Blue Room, Red Room, East Room, State Dining Room, and Entrance Hall. Their work included replacing furnishings, applying decorative paint patterns, and installing wallpaper with intricate designs. Importantly, they incorporated one of Wheeler's award-winning work, known as "Honeybee," into this renovation effort. It also designed the main spaces of the extant Mark Twain house in West Hartford, CT.
Associated Artists
In 1883 Wheeler formed her own firm, specializing in textiles and mainly involving women, under the name Associated Artists. They produced a wide range of goods including tapestries and theater drop curtains. The Associated Artists was particularly well known for its "changeable" silks, their iridescence produced by interweaving differently colored threads seen in varying angles and lights.
Wealthy customers could purchase custom designs. Andrew Carnegie commissioned a Scotch thistle damask. Lillie Langtry ordered a pair of rose-themed portieres for her bedroom that were coordinated with a transparent silk bed canopy embroidered with roses from which embroidered petals appeared to have dropped onto the bedcover—an example of Wheeler's conceptual thinking.
Between 1884 and 1894, the Cheney Brothers mills of Manchester, CT, turned out more than 500 silk fabrics designed by The Associated Artists in a range of prices that were sold throughout the United States. At the same time, Wheeler created less expensive products for a wider audience with machine-ready patterns for denim and other cottons. She consciously created American designs based on local plant forms.
The Associated Artists' signature needle-woven tapestry was a combination of loom weaving and handwork that Wheeler had invented and patented in 1881. The technique made the stitches practically invisible to create a smooth surfaced tapestry.
Onteora
One of Wheeler's touted achievements was the creation of a vacation community in the Catskills, Onteora, still ongoing. In 1883 she and her wealthy brother Frank (Francis Beattie Thurber) selected elevated land with extensive views near Tannersville, NY, on which to build two summer houses for their respective families. By 1887 Wheeler and her sister-in-law, Jeannette (Mrs. Francis B.) Thurber (herself acclaimed for advancing music training and performance in America during this period), decided to expand and develop their property as a vacation community of like-minded people dedicated to the arts. Wheeler commissioned her son Dunham, then a fledgling architect, to design several of the early buildings (thereby launching a modest career specializing in summer homes). The Associated Artists designed the interiors. Wheeler greatly expanded her originally modest house, Pennyroyal (actually owned by Dora) over the years, and cultivated a garden which became the point of departure for her delightful book, Content in a Garden (1901). Onteora eventually comprised two thousand acres of land.
World's Columbian Exposition
In 1893, at the age of 66, Wheeler agreed to take charge of the interior of the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair, and to organize the State of New York's applied arts exhibition there. The Woman's Building was overseen by Bertha Palmer and designed by architect Sophia Hayden. Artists featured in the Woman's Building included Alice Rideout, Mary Cassatt, Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Amanda Brewster Sewell, Lydia Field Emmet, Marie Herndl, and Wheeler's daughter Dora Wheeler Keith. The building was filled with exhibitions of women's fine arts, crafts, industrial products and regional and ethnic specialties from around the world, which were discussed in some of Wheeler's subsequent writings. Her widely read paean to the Columbian Exposition, "A Dream City," appeared in Harper's Monthly (1893).
A frieze encircling the grand rotunda of the Woman's Building listed the ''golden names of women who in past and present centuries have done honor to the human race,'' a roll-call echoed in the names on the floor of Judy Chicago's 1979 ''The Dinner Party.''
Later life
In the early years of the twentieth century Wheeler traveled and vacationed in the South. In 1909 she built a winter home in Thomasville, GA, adjacent to that of her good friend Janet Chase Hoyt. Wheeler spent much of her later life, mainly there and at Onteora, writing books and articles on decorating and the textile arts, as well as fiction and poetry. She published her last book in 1921.
Books
Prize Painting Book: Good Times. (New York: White & Stokes, 1881)
Household Art. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893)
Content in a Garden. (New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1901)
How to Make Rugs. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1902)
Principles of Home Decoration. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company,1903)
Doubledarling and the Dreamspinner. (New York: Fox, Duffield & Company, 1905)
The Annals of Onteora: 1887–1914. (New York: E.W. Whitfield, 1914)
Yesterdays in a Busy Life. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918)
The Development of Embroidery in America. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921)
References
Notes
Sources
Peck, Amelia. “Candace Wheeler (1827–1923).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004)
Ila Weiss (2022-2023), Candace Wheeler, A Creative Life: Book One, Genesis (1827-1876); Book Two, Fruition (1876-1892); Book Three, Bounty (1887-1923). Kindle Direct
External links
Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900, a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Candace Wheeler: The Mother of American Interior Design.
Candace Wheeler, designer and reformer.
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Candace Wheeler (1827–1923).
Burrows Studio: Associated Artists Collection. Candace Wheeler Fabric and Wallpaper Designs.
1827 births
1923 deaths
American designers
19th-century American women artists
20th-century American women artists
American women interior designers
American interior designers