Renowned North American textile designer. Great driver of the professionalization of women’s work in the field of design. In 1879, Candace Wheeler along with partner and friend Louis Comfort Tiffany they co-founded an interior-decorating firm in the name of Tiffany & Wheeler.
Candace Thurber Wheeler was born in March 1827 in Delhi; in the Catskill Mountains region, southeast of the US state of New York. Thurber was the third of eight children. He attended a nursery school where at six he had the first experiences in sewing. He later attended the Delaware Academy in Delhi. His father, known as Deacon Thurber, was strictly Presbyterian and a professed abolitionist. Products manufactured by slaves were never used in the family’s rural house. Mrs. Thurber had a more practical and less idealistic look than her husband. The home of the Thurber was a small factory destined to supply the needs of a large family: they made their own candles, produced maple syrup, cured and smoked their own meat, They grew their own vegetables and even wove their own blankets for the winter. For Candace Thurber, his happy childhood had the imprint of growing “about a hundred years ago in time,” closer to a 17th-century New England family. The reading material was even selected by his father; the Bible was the “literary bread,” as Thurber described it.
The family rural house enjoyed numerous visits, especially traveling missionaries. The stable was an occasional whereabouts for slaves escaping north. Candace Wheeler would remember years later how her schoolmates called her queen of blacks , in a community where abolitionism was not a most accepted cause. In this context, Wheeler did not have too many examples of how a woman could be independent; but he coined the idea and desire of an individual and self-sufficient path.
In the city life where I grew up there were no fortune girls or some self-sufficient woman. There were one or two single old women who helped each other with teaching at school or giving piano lessons; and those two occupations were the only ones open to single women. The career of a powerful and competent single woman, as we know her today, was an unannounced dream.
In 1843, during a trip to New York, Candace Thurber met businessman Thomas Mason Wheeler, with whom he married and had four children. The family lived several years in Long Island and Wheeler was dedicated to raising their children. I was also not disconnected from the world around her and developed a great interest in culture and the arts. It was her husband who opened the doors to the world and introduced her to the environment of artists and writers. For Candace Wheeler, marriage was the possibility of “overcoming a century, leaving behind the habits and thoughts of early Puritan life and entering a new world of advanced thinking and intellectual freedom.” Wheeler’s circle of friends included artists Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford and Jervis McEntee.
I got a great help from all these friendly artists, and as I had always drawn flowers with enthusiasm and success, and I loved the complexities and mysteries of color, I found myself before an important production as an amateur painter, with accepted photos and even sold in Exhibitions .
In 1876, at age 49 and after 32 years of marriage, Candace Wheeler lost her eldest daughter due to Bright’s disease. This hard experience made her look at the world around her differently and prompted her to look for a new meaning for her life.
Initially, he worked for a non-profit organization, since charity work was the traditional place recognized for women of that century. Ambitious and strong, he did not accept amateur status in his work and set out to build his own path. In this sense, she was an early feminist determined to promote and disseminate art and design as a career for women that exceeded the hobby category and allowed them to find new projections for their personal fulfillment and economic independence.
Women of all classes had always depended on the salaried capacity of men and, although strict adherence to custom had become inconvenient and did not fit in time, their feeling remained. But time was ripe for a change. It was still an unwritten law that women should not be salaried or salary beneficiaries, but the need was stronger than the law.
The contextual reality of the moment was also an important factor of change. The consequences of the Civil War and the economic debacle faced a large number of women, previously dependent on husbands, fathers, children and brothers, to the need to sustain themselves by their own means. Candace Wheeler was the first woman to apply large-scale domestic arts and crafts with a profitable, business and business vision. Wheeler worked hard for women’s economic liberation, turning women’s artistic and domestic skills into viable merchandise.
Inspired by the embroidery produced by the Royal School of Art in England, which she saw at the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, Wheeler founded the Society of Decorative Art in New York in 1877 . Other founding members were Louis Comfort Tiffany, John LaFarge, and Elizabeth Custer. The organization offered instruction in applied arts (sewing, embroidery and others) for women with or without previous experience.
In 1878, Wheeler helped launch an exchange program for women’s work, where women could sell any product they could make in the country, including bakery products and white clothes. This new company served a wider group of women, since no artistic skills were required. The New York Exchange for Women’s Work opened in March 1878 with a consignment sale of thirty items in the house of co-founder Mary Choate. The venture was a success and within a year there were more than thirty branches with more than 500 subscribers in North America: Chicago, San Luis, Hartford, Detroit, New York and South Carolina.
In 1879, Wheeler resigned from the Society of Decorative Arts. Simultaneously to his pioneering work for the professionalization of women in the field of design, Candace Wheeler also stood out as a textile designer and interior designer. He admired the work of British designers such as William Morris and Walter Crane and studied and absorbed elements of Japanese design. This experience led her to develop a sophisticated American textile style in which the natural forms of native plants were interpreted as fluid designs. The use of Native American color and flora, such as ivy, lilies, pineapples and thistles, generated a distinctive seal. Their designs were used to produce affordable and practical fabrics for use in middle class homes. He explored unusual weaving and printing techniques and,
In 1879, with designer Louis Comfort Tiffany (renowned designer and glass worker), Candace Wheeler co-founded the interior decoration company Tiffany & Wheeler . The company carried out numerous projects such as the re-decoration of the White House, the Madison Square Theater, the Union League Club, the George Kemp house, the hall of the Cornelius Vanderbilt II house, the Mark Twain house in Hartford, the Hall of Veterans of the Arsenal of the Seventh Regiment and several houses of wealthy families of the time.
Later, in 1883, Wheeler opened his own firm Associative Artists , Artists Associates , a company composed of women specializing in textile design. Candace Wheeler was the president and her daughter Dora Wheeler Keith, vice-president. The company produced a wide range of textile products, including tapestries and curtains. Associated Artists was particularly known for its reversible silks executed in two threads. Consistent with its principles and values, Wheeler wanted its products to be available to a wide audience, by creating machine-reproducible machine patterns in an industrial manner. Between 1884 and 1894, Cheney BrothersIt produced more than 500 fabrics for Associated Artists that were sold in the United States at all levels of the market. The upholstery style of the association’s artists was a combination of classic loom and upholstery loom that Wheeler herself had invented. The technique achieved almost invisible stitches with a visually smoother textile finish. Associated Artists remained active until 1907.
In 1893, at the age of 66, Candace Wheeler was responsible for designing the interior of the Women’s Building at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. His daughter Dora painted the ceiling fresco in that building. Wheeler was also in charge of the New York Applied Arts exhibition for the same event.
Like Tiffany, William Morris, James McNeil Whistler and other 19th-century art visionaries, Wheeler embraced the aestheticism and movement of arts and crafts, and his wallpaper and textile designs predicted the art nouveau style of decoration.
In 1883, Candace Wheeler, her husband, her brother Frank Thurber and her sister-in-law, bought land in Greene County and began what would become Onteora Park ; an exclusive private colony of mountain huts for the summer months. His brother’s house, Lotus Land, and his house, Pennyroyal, were the first to be built. Over the years many famous people built houses in Onteora including writer Mary Mapes Dodge, actress Maude Adams and Elizabeth Custer, widow of General George Armstrong Custer. In 1887 the Bear & Fox inn was built in the park. The inn became the socio-cultural center of Onteora Park ; a place to perform dances, conferences, plays and other meetings.
Wheeler is the author of numerous books and articles on interior design, decoration, embroidery and gardening; many of which were written at his home in Onteora Park. He also addressed the fiction genre for children and adults and wrote his autobiographical memoirs. Household Art (1893); Content in a Garden (1901); How to make rugs (1902), Principles of Home Decoration (1903); The Annals of Onteora: 1887–1914 (1914); Yesterdays in a busy life (1918); The Development of Embroidery in America (1921); These are some of the titles where Wheeler proposed specific instructions to new decorators and encouraged women to think of themselves as creators of their homes.
Candace Wheeler passed away in 1923, at 96 years of age.