L & J. G. Stickley’s No. 220 settle from a catalog.

I sometimes wonder whether the Stickley brothers ever gathered as a group in adulthood. I picture them, perhaps sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, or watching their children open Christmas presents, and imagine the undercurrents and tensions that likely arose when five brothers–Gustav, Leopold, John George, Albert, and Charles–all engaged, in various combinations of partnership, in the same profession with varying degrees of success in New York and Michigan–came together in a single place. Shared meals could have been especially fraught after Gustav’s bankruptcy and short-lived association with Leopold and John George’s company. The latter two brothers built their company on designs in the same style as Gustav’s Craftsman furniture before adapting to changing tastes. While the No. 220 settle shows a Craftsman influence, it is, as Bob Lang observers in Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture unlike anything produced by Gustav Stickley. Continue reading →