Candace Wheeler

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.[26][27]

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.[28] 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."[7][29][30]

Wheeler co-founded the Society of Decorative Art with Caroline E. Lamson (Mrs. David) Lane in New York in 1877.[30][31] She hired the recently widowed Elizabeth Bacon (Mrs. General George Armstrong) Custer as secretary: the two women became fast, life-long friends.[2][5][32] 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.[30][32][23]

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.[29][33] 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.[34]

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.[30][34] 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.[32] The New York Exchange continued to operate until 2003.[35]

In 1879, Candace Wheeler and Louis Comfort Tiffany co-founded the interior-decorating firm of Tiffany & Wheeler, with Wheeler responsible for textiles.[30][34] 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.[23][36][37]

Associated Artists embroidered card table cover, 44" x 44", silk thread embroidery on cloth, circa 1900

In 1883 Wheeler formed her own firm, specializing in textiles and mainly involving women, under the name Associated Artists.[29][34][30][38][39] They produced a wide range of goods including tapestries and theater drop curtains.[40] 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.[41][7]

Wealthy customers could purchase custom designs. Andrew Carnegie commissioned a Scotch thistle damask.[40] 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.[7][42]

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.[43] 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.[30][40][44]

The Associated Artists' signature needle-woven tapestry was a combination of loom weaving and handwork that Wheeler had invented and patented in 1881.[40][45] The technique made the stitches practically invisible to create a smooth surfaced tapestry.[7][46]

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.[47] 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).[48] 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).[49] Onteora eventually comprised two thousand acres of land.[50]

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.[34] 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.[51] 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.[52] Her widely read paean to the Columbian Exposition, "A Dream City," appeared in Harper's Monthly (1893).[53]

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.''[52]

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.[23][54] She published her last book in 1921.[23][55]

• 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)[56]
• 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)