Side chair

The Rose Valley Association was a utopian Arts and Crafts colony founded in 1901 near Moylan, Pennsylvania, by William Lightfoot Price. A Philadelphia architect with a coterie of his politically liberal colleagues, clients, and friends, he was inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris, advocates of the British Arts and Crafts movement. The community was established for the "manufacture of … materials and products involving artistic handicraft as are used in the finishing, decorating and furnishing of houses," according to its incorporation papers, dated July 17, 1901. Within a year, the Rose Valley Shops were producing furniture designed by Price as well as pottery, metalwork, and bookbindings. Price and the community valued the Medieval ideals of craftsmanship, and freely appropriated Gothic designs in the furniture they produced, as exemplified by this chair, seen especially in the chair back’s carved lancets and tracery of a evocative of the openings of a stained-glass window. In addition, the craftsmen often fabricated their pieces with interlocking and highly visible tenons, making it possible to easily dismantle them. The saddle seat and tapered, splayed legs reflect the traditional, handcrafted methods at the center of the Arts and Crafts movement, which Price and the Rose Valley Shops utilized until 1910, when their idealistic experiment failed.