There is no such thing as style until the style is dead. Style is only vital in the transition period—while men are working at it, perfecting it, keeping it still in a state of solution. There could be no such thing as style in the present tense.
—William Lightfoot Price, 1904
The Rose Valley Shops, which produced furniture from 1901 until 1906, were located at architect William Lightfoot Price’s (1861–1916) utopian experiment near Moylan, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the houses he designed exhibit many characteristics of the Arts and Crafts style (fig. 1). Beyond the Rose Valley community, Price’s furniture is most often used to demonstrate his commitment to the Arts and Crafts philosophy in general and to William Morris’s idea of a “banded workshop” in particular (fig. 2). Furniture bearing the Rose Valley Shops’ mark has been studied within the context of the American Arts and Crafts movement since Robert Judson Clark’s landmark exhibition, “The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876–1916,” opened in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1972 (figs. 3, 4); however, Price’s design vocabulary and the “structural theory” he employed were fully formed years before the workshops began production in an old mill on Ridley Creek, and he continued to design furniture after the shops closed in 1906. It is difficult to reconcile Price’s rigorous version of the simple life as published in his magazine the Artsman with the grand and gaudy châteauesque mansions he designed, where furniture made in the Rose Valley Gothic style was sometimes placed alongside sharply contrasting plain furniture from the Craftsman factory operated by another icon of the American Arts and Crafts movement, Gustav Stickley (1858–1942) (fig. 5). The incongruity may be more jarring to the early twenty-first-century connoisseur who perceives Stickley’s designs as progressive and Price’s as historicist; early twentieth-century consumers were more aware of the antique prototypes that inspired both Stickley and Price, for whom reference to a romanticized past was an important component of their version of the Arts and Crafts simple life.[1]
Although Price probably learned some carpentry before studying with Philadelphia architects Addison Hutton and Frank Furness, he had little experience in furniture making, unlike Stickley, who worked in his uncle’s furniture factory before striking out on his own. Nor was Price a trained wood-carver, as was his contemporary Karl von Rydingsvärd (1863–1941), who learned to build and carve furniture at the Royal Technical School in Sweden. However, Price did visit Britain and Europe, where he made detailed drawings of buildings and antique furniture. For Price, those notes constituted a reference library of construction techniques and primarily Gothic motifs that he later incorporated in his designs for architectural woodwork and freestanding furniture.[2]
Price may have developed preferences for certain carving styles while traveling in Europe, although it is equally possible that his tastes were influenced by the plethora of hand-carved woodwork produced by his peers. John Kirchmayer (1860–1930) studied carving in Oberammergau, Germany, before coming to the United States, where he carved vast quantities of Gothic ornament to the designs of architects like Ralph Adams Cram and Henry Vaughn. Kirchmayer worked in the manner of medieval artisans, who seldom left intentional evidence of the gouges they used to form their sculptural decorations (fig. 6). In contrast, Karl von Rydingsvärd—lauded in 1909 as “the foremost woodcarver of America”—was influenced by Norse antiquities, and his carvings often relate to the two-dimensional interlacings characteristic of the Viking style, which he helped to popularize. He occasionally left evidence of his gouges, particularly when flattening the surfaces of boards for use in paneling, but most of his softly swelling ornamentation is smooth (fig. 7). Edward Maene (1852–1931) and his nephew John (1863–1928) learned to carve wood and stone in Belgium. They immigrated to the United States in the early 1880s. By 1894, the Maenes had a workshop in Philadelphia and John was advertising as a sculptor offering “Art Furniture” as well as “Interior and Exterior Decorations.” John worked with his uncle in the city until he became the foreman of the Rose Valley furniture shops in 1902 (fig. 8). Price provided drawings for every detail of Rose Valley furniture and then oversaw its production, thereby controlling the style of carving. The ornamentation the Maenes carved for Price always exhibits subtle facets left by shallow gouges, but Price believed in using modern planing machines so one never sees the marks of hand tools on the undecorated, flat surfaces of Rose Valley furniture (fig. 9).[3]
Price occasionally ordered architectural carving and woodwork from large firms, like Pottier and Stymus of New York, but his principal source was John and Edward Maenes’ Philadelphia shop. Price hired the Maenes to build a cabinet commissioned in 1903 by Horace Trumbauer, architect of sugar baron William Harrison’s massive stone house Grey Towers. The cabinet was intended to hold Harrison’s four volumes of Shakespeare, which included a Merchant of Venice folio purchased from Philadelphia book dealer Philip Rosenbach. Edward Maene carved the cabinet with Gothic motifs referencing Shakespeare and supervised its assembly, which occurred in the Maenes’ Philadelphia shop rather than at the Rose Valley shop, where John had recently become master. Even though countless detailed letters and drawings about each step of production were exchanged between the architect, patron, and producers, Harrison was unhappy about the cost of the cabinet and instructed Trumbauer to sue Maene. In the latter’s defense, Price solicited the opinion of tastemaker, architect, and University of Pennsylvania professor Warren P. Laird, who described the cabinet as “the finest piece of furniture ever made in this country” (figs. 10-14).[4]
The Gothic style offered Price the best opportunity to demonstrate what he and Stickley referred to as the “structural idea”—allowing construction to be the guiding principle of furniture design. Arts and Crafts scholars have made much of that principle, but it was not unique to that style and was often used as a marketing ploy, mantra-like, to denigrate contemporaneous, mass-produced furniture. At issue was the “honesty” of furniture construction and design. Price wanted his furniture to be exactly what it appeared to be. His Gothic tables are made of sturdy oak boards, assembled with visible joinery and kept in place with butterfly joints and elaborately carved pins (figs. 15-19). When the pins are removed, the tables can be disassembled and easily moved. Portability may have been a consideration in many of Price’s designs, since his furniture was not sold through showrooms in major cities other than at Price’s architectural offices at 1624 Walnut Street, in Philadelphia (figs. 20-22). His furniture was exhibited at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, the Guild of Arts and Crafts in New York City, and the Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904 (three chairs, a bench, and a “Gothic table”), but most of his public exposure was through advertisements placed in magazines with large circulations like House and Garden and smaller periodicals like the Artsman.[5]
In 1904 John Maene advocated the integration of design and production in an article in the Artsman:
In executing designs variations will spontaneously occur, some of them wonderfully advantageous . . . that . . . would have been impossible even to imitate on paper. This is no doubt where the creative mind of the carver or modeler will ascertain itself. . . . It is fortunate if the [maker] . . . is also the designer of his work.
However much Price may have agreed with Maene in theory, in practice he separated design from production.[6]
The designs Price furnished to guide his craftsmen’s work are distinctive enough to support attributions to the shops at Rose Valley and Arden, Delaware, another utopian community he founded. A circa 1903 photograph of the Rose Valley shop shows him drawing at a table in the back, an unidentified craftsman using a smooth plane to finish a large piece of stock at his workbench, and John Maene carving a Gothic panel in the foreground (fig. 23). The furniture and carved components are oriented to provide optimal frontal or oblique views; the middle bench is angled to provide an unobstructed view of the work surface. The Gothic table closest to the camera descended in the family of Price’s brother Walter (see fig. 66). The panels John Maene is working on are identical to panels used on the table made for John O. Gilmore (fig. 18). A drawing based on this photograph of the shop appeared in the December 1903 issue of the Artsman; thus, one might assume that Price had a hand in the photograph’s setup. In the visual hierarchy of the composition, handwork and the craftsmen responsible for it are at the forefront; however, Price’s presence suggests that he wanted viewers to see that he was intimately involved as a designer and manager.[7]
Price’s oversight is reflected in the carving he designed for mansions, smaller houses in his utopian communities, and furniture. This work is remarkably consistent despite the fact that it was executed by several different workmen and made for a wide range of patrons and projects. Price’s designs were more restrained than those of Edward and John Maene, especially when the Maenes deviated from Price’s designs.
Price influenced a number of artisans who worked for him, including Henry Hetzel, who became a member of the Rose Valley community in 1903. Hetzel rented part of an old bobbin mill where he set up a shop for metal- and woodwork and made furniture for the House of the Democrat—a model home designed by Price and intended to cost between $1,200 and $2,400 (fig. 24). Several pieces of Hetzel’s furniture are visible in an interior photograph published in the March 1906 issue of American Homes and Gardens (fig. 25), including a bench whose design appeared the previous year in the Artsman (figs. 26, 27). Hetzel’s bench, which survives with its original green corduroy cushion, has through-tenoned rails that are locked in place with ornate keys and shaped sides with cutouts and carved details similar to those on furniture designed by Price and made at Arden (fig. 28). Architect John Bissegger (b. 1868), who was also associated with the Rose Valley community, published several drawings of furniture designed by Price in the Artsman. Bissegger also designed furniture, which resembles work from the Rose Valley shops but is more reliant on historical precedent (fig. 29).[8]
Price never intended the Rose Valley shop to produce furnishings for every aspect of the Arts and Crafts lifestyle, as did Stickley, who manufactured furniture for living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and porches, as well as office furniture, chafing dishes, coal hods, andirons, curtains, bedspreads, lamps, rugs, and pianos. In fact, Price avoided some furniture forms because he thought they did not lend themselves to his design sensibilities. As a result, no freestanding chests of drawers, conventional couches, or beds from the Rose Valley shop are known. In contrast, Edward Maene designed a broader range of forms, finding inspiration in the prevailing European furniture fashions of the second half of the nineteenth century, which provided ample surfaces for his interpretations of Renaissance carved motifs (figs. 30-32).[9]
Price’s status as an Arts and Crafts designer is often misjudged because his interpretations of the movement’s theories are difficult to perceive in Arts and Crafts products, which are often indistinguishable from other fashionable furnishings produced at the turn of the last century. The work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, who designed metal objects, jewelry, pottery, and furniture along with his famous blown- and leaded-glass windows, is always prominent in American Arts and Crafts surveys even though there is little other than the era in which he worked to connect him to that movement. Tiffany objects on display in museums and offered at auction give the impression that most of his work was done in the art nouveau style, but many Tiffany Studio advertisements promoted Georgian or American “colonial” furnishings and ersatz interpretations of European antiques (fig. 33). As was the case with Tiffany, objects and buildings with obvious Arts and Crafts attributes formed a limited part of Price’s oeuvre. Although usually associated with work in the Gothic manner, Price produced designs for furniture in a wide variety of styles, including Queen Anne, Georgian, Jacobean, Renaissance, and Louis Quinze (figs. 34-40). He expressed his philosophical convictions through experiments in utopian community living, not through the furniture his shops made for the grandiose mansions he continued to design after establishing Rose Valley and Arden (figs. 41, 42). Householders in those communities typically used their own furnishings, including Native American artifacts, antique spinning wheels, and ladder-back chairs made locally in the Delaware Valley (figs. 43, 44).[10]
Price called for the use of Stickley’s Craftsman furniture in the Gilmore house in Merion (1899) and the Clarke (1901) and Graham (1902) houses in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, but the interiors of those dwellings included Gothic, Renaissance, and other historic details. Although the Craftsman furnishings in the Greene house (1911) in Woodbury, New Jersey (fig. 45), were more in harmony with the architecture, photographs of the Frank Wheeler house (1911) in Indianapolis suggest that the simplicity of the Greene house and its furnishings did not represent a significant shift in Price’s designs. The woodwork in the Wheeler house is made of mahogany rather than dark oak, which Price used in most of his houses, and has carved floral motifs that reference the Vienna Secession. The newel posts, however, are topped with the same loosely draped figures that Price used in his French Gothic houses (figs. 46, 47).
Lionel Robertson, an artist and decorator who worked with the Tobey Furniture Company of Chicago, provided most of the “fitments” for the Wheeler interiors. Among the objects he designed were armchairs that stood in the front hall and a tall-case clock at the top of the stairs. The object most directly associated with Price’s work is a marble table made for the hall, which resembles several oak tables from Rose Valley Shop (fig. 48). His use of Tobey and Stickley furnishings leads one to assume that Price also subcontracted custom-made furniture for the large Atlantic City hotels he designed. Candidates for the latter class of work would include the Chinese red chairs used in the dining room of the Traymore Hotel, which relate to seating made for the dining room of the Wheeler house (figs. 49, 50). The Traymore chairs were probably produced for additions to the hotel in 1914–1915. Like Stickley’s contemporaneous Chromewald furniture (fig. 51), this seating deviates from mainstream Arts and Crafts work, although less so in the case of Price, who used painted and gilded decoration on earlier oak furniture, including a polychrome chair that descended in the family of his brother Walter (fig. 52).[11]
The chairs illustrated in figure 52 descended in the family of Walter Price. Both types of seating occasionally turn up with the same provenance, which suggests that Price recommended them for concurrent use (figs. 53, 54). It is possible that Price saw the antique prototypes for his versions displayed together when he was traveling through Europe or found them illustrated together in a book. He sometimes copied antiques with only slight modifications to scale or detail (figs. 55-58).
In an article extolling the potential for ratskeller design in American architecture, Price wrote, “[Thomas] Carlyle says that ‘originality does not consist of being different, but in being sincere.’” Although not solely because of Price’s advocacy, the ratskeller’s vaulted ceilings and quaint furnishings showed up in many American interiors, especially restaurants. Furniture and architecture from the Tyrolean regions of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy inspired several American craftsmen during the Arts and Crafts era. Price’s peer Wilson Eyre quoted the ratskeller in his famous design for the 1894 Mask and Wig Club in Philadelphia. Price himself was fond of the proportions of the broad foundation arches that formed the ceilings of Kellers (cellars), and, despite his concerns about sincerity, he used broad arches everywhere except in basements. Period photographs of the broadly arched third-floor space of Price’s house Kelty show “Tyrolean” chairs, which are similar to seating made at Arden by Don Stephens (fig. 59). In the ratskeller article, Eyre wrote, “But the way we do the thing is after all much more important than what we do, especially if the method is ours and what we do is, in the main, let us say borrowed.” As Bissegger’s drawing of “A Rose Valley Hall Chair” in the March 1905 issue of the Artsman indicates, Price’s designs for that genre of seating have tenoned legs and board seats and backs that were derived from brettstuhls but occasionally decorated with Gothic or Renaissance motifs (figs. 60-64).[12]
The idiosyncratic Gothic style associated with the Philadelphia area in general and Price’s mentor Frank Furness in particular had its roots in the reform ideas of such British designers as Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852) and Christopher Dresser (1834–1904). Dresser’s “Modern Gothic” designs echoed Pugin’s penchant for forms without obvious historical precedents. Price’s Gothic furniture almost always shows a deep understanding of antique styles and traditional joinery, but it never results in mere mimesis. Although Rose Valley furniture cannot be mistaken for anything other than the product of the early twentieth century, Price’s work relates to the various reform movements in theory, not in appearance (figs. 65, 66).[13]
Design mavens now place a premium on originality and progressive modernism, whereas Price dismissed existing doctrines of beauty and style as irrelevant. Assessments published in the Artsman, which served as a forum for Price’s opinions, are often difficult to understand because he failed to specify when his use of the term “artsman” referred to himself or to a craftsman in general:
One of the many things which the artsman must avoid is stupefying doctrine. It is quite possible to create doctrines of style, which would be destructive of the artsman ideal. The artsman has no one style. He encourages creation. He advises invention, divergence, innovation. None of them at the expense of truth. He does not say a table must be of a certain style. That any other style is heresy. That only one style is endorsed by the creed. That judges and juries may save and condemn. The artsman leaves style to the artsman. All that the artsman asks is that what you do shall be done on the square. Yes, in the right spirit. Honestly. . . . You as an individual may not like his style. You may find his taste unpleasing. But if he is self-consistent, if he has obeyed the rigorous law of his own mastership, he arrives among the artsmen, enlisted in the service of the industrial ideal. . . . It is not your privilege to say: This is not pretty—therefore you are no artsman. Does it give honest reasons for itself?[14]
This passage can be interpreted as a sweeping rejection of aesthetics in the assessment of a craftsman’s work. However vague the term “right spirit” may appear to modern readers, it was the only measure of worth Price could accept. Honesty and truth were refrains in the Arts and Crafts anthem, but they were seldom put into practice in the American version of the movement, where marketing and profitability were paramount. Large companies like the Rookwood and Grueby potteries and the Stickley brothers’ various furniture-making enterprises used Arts and Crafts rhetoric in their advertising, but these companies would not have been successful if they had ignored style, as Price understood it. Studio artisans like potter George Ohr and woodworker Charles Rohlfs also recognized the importance of marketing. They succeeded in making their distinctive styles a commodity because consumers were—and still are—typically more interested in the appearance of objects than the method of production. Rohlfs’s furniture was most often categorized as art furniture and used as accents in conventional interiors rather than as parts of harmonious ensembles. This was also true of Price’s furniture, but he rationalized his marketing by asserting that the craftsman’s “best chance for establishing a life of simplicity and artsmanship seems to be at present in the making of things that are more or less expensive and that only the well-to-do can buy. We must meet the market of the time in which we live, until our new world is born, and plenty and peace have taken the place of ‘prosperity’ and war.”[15]
The Arts and Crafts movement attempted to eliminate the lacuna between the lifestyle of the rich and the lifestyle of the poor by elevating esteem for “a life of simplicity,” but it seldom proposed such a grand prospect as bringing peace and plenty to Everyman. The vision that linked prosperity to peace grew from Price’s Quaker roots. His extended family was prominent in the greater Philadelphia community of the Society of Friends, giving him a ready-made context within which to codify his unique version of the Arts and Crafts movement.
The Quaker influence in Philadelphia culture began when William Penn founded the Province of Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century. Many of the society’s principles regarding the simple life shaped the Arts and Crafts movement as it developed in the region during the nineteenth century. The sect’s founder, George Fox, believed that each person has “Inner Light,” which allows an individual experience of God without the intervention or interpretation of a mediating agent like a priest. The Arts and Crafts philosophy held that anyone, regardless of training or financial standing, had the capacity, or “right spirit” as Price described it, to bring beauty into daily life. The Quaker faith’s ideas about simplicity, truth, harmony, and equality parallel the primary tenets of the secular Arts and Crafts movement and are today similarly misperceived. In the popular understanding of simplicity or “plainness,” an elaborate eighteenth-century mahogany high chest of drawers owned by a Philadelphia Quaker and a richly carved twentieth-century Rose Valley table commissioned by a Philadelphia industrialist would seem to contradict Quaker and Arts and Crafts philosophies, respectively. However, Friends have never been required to eschew luxury; they are enjoined only to avoid vain expressions that might distract them from pursuing their Inner Light. As Price defined the Arts and Crafts, truth to materials and honest construction did not require plainness or preclude carved embellishments. Quakers were encouraged to live in ways similar to Arts and Crafts utopian theory. Congregations were not necessarily geographically distinct units, but Quaker meetinghouses were the centers of communities of closely related families. Price’s relatives constituted, until very recently, the majority of Rose Valley’s inhabitants, where Artsman’s Hall functioned as the community meetinghouse. A nondenominational church was planned for Arden, but it was never built, so a clubhouse served as the meeting place for the residents, many of whom were related.[16]
It is difficult to ascertain the size of Price’s furniture production because the records pertaining to his furniture designs and sales are numerous but incomplete, and it is impossible to determine how many objects were made in the shop at Rose Valley, the Maenes’ Philadelphia workshop, or at Arden. A scrapbook associated with Rose Valley lists orders for specific furniture designs, but some of the objects may have been made elsewhere, including known examples bearing the shop brand. Further confusion results from the fact that orders listed under a photograph of a particular design were not always for identical objects. Photographs or drawings do not accompany all orders, and many surviving objects do not appear in the scrapbook. Several important commissions—for Alexander Mackay-Smith and his daughter Helen, Spencer K. Mulford, and Joseph Fels—included furniture designed in 1906, after production at Rose Valley ended (fig. 67). Presumably, that work was done in the Maenes’ Philadelphia shop. Even so, the records suggest that fewer than five hundred pieces of furniture were produced at the Maenes’ shop and the Rose Valley shop combined. Production would have been considerably greater had Price won commissions from institutions like the University Club of Chicago, whose building was competed in 1909. Price sent sketches for furnishings for the “Ladies’ dining room (30 tables and 80 chairs), the main dining room, the assembly room, and the ‘College Hall.’” He noted that the furniture was to be made in “quartered white oak, stained and finished with wax. All to be special hand-made furniture with all joints mortised, tenoned and pinned.” The club’s architects, Holabird and Roche, seem not to have been impressed by the promise of sturdy handwork because they chose the more prestigious Tiffany Studios to provide the furnishings.[17]
During the first decades of the twentieth century, many tastemakers favored stained and waxed white oak. In December 1910 Walter A. Dryer wrote:
Oak is coming to its own again. It is bound to. Not only in the cheap golden-oak furniture and in the solid mission and craftsman styles, but in simple wax finishes that leave it stand on its own merits. It is in improved methods of finish, in fact, that its salvation lies. Whether carved or plain, whether fumed or silvered. Whether dull or highly polished, it is beautiful, and in the best antique finishes it surpasses all other woods for library and dining room.[18]
Judging from Price’s interior woodwork and the furniture made at Rose Valley, the characteristic brown stain and wax finishes used by his workmen were durable and of high quality. Taft and Belknap Galleries of New York registered the only known complaint in 1904. The firm was angry that a Cabot stain, instead of a custom formula, was used on a wood box supplied to a New Jersey client: “If your workmen are not sufficiently versed in stain, and don’t know how to mix colors without using some patent stain, it is well time you paid for the experience.” Price and the Maenes knew how to mix colors and stains and instructed their workmen in the preparation of finishes they preferred. A letter Price wrote to the superintendent of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition described the application of a creosote stain, which was
applied with a brush and rubbed down with cotton waste within the hour. After drying for 12 to 24 hours the wood was given a thin coat of boiled linseed oil, the oil rubbed, as the stain was and left to stand for twenty-four hours, and finished with wax . . . and rubbed with an ordinary shoe polishing brush.
Creosote is made from tars produced from the carbonization of bituminous coal; its use is now regulated because it is a carcinogen, but in 1904 it was widely used as a wood preservative and colorant. The black tar changes to a rich transparent brown when properly thinned. The Samuel Cabot company patented its formula in 1884 and advertised that the stains produced by the firm were “made of Creosote, pure linseed oil and the best pigments,” leaving one to question the variations described in the Taft and Belknap complaint.[19]
By Price’s measure, his style and that of the Arts and Crafts movement are dead, and he would probably have rejected the romantic notion that there could be a modern manifestation of either. Assessing the degree to which Price, Stickley, or Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony founder Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead adhered to an Arts and Crafts philosophy helps develop a portrait of each individual, but it is not a meaningful gauge of the success or failure of what those men produced. Furniture making stopped at Byrdcliffe by circa 1904, the Rose Valley shop closed in 1906, and by the time Price died, a decade later, Stickley’s businesses were in decline. Modern scholars, conflating longevity with merit, have judged all of these experiments in craft production to be failures. Such pronouncements about products of the Arts and Crafts movement seem both arbitrary and unique in decorative arts history. Traditionally, historians of American woodworking and furniture making have based discussions of merit on regionalism, quality of craftsmanship, technique, and aesthetics. Nineteenth-century industrialization added the new modifiers of mass production, originality, progressivism, modernity, and globalization.[20]
Regionalism was central to Price’s architecture and philosophy but not to his furniture design. New and antique Gothic furniture was imported by the boatload from Europe and shipped to every part of the United States. Large domestic furniture factories and smaller cabinetmaking enterprises also satisfied demands for the style. Craftsmanship, not regionalism, distinguishes Price’s furniture. His logical designs, insistence on functional, handmade joinery, control of carving style, and consistent finish resulted in furniture of the highest quality. He did not reject modern technology outright, but his furniture was made entirely by hand after the wood had been sawn into boards and planed by machines. Mass production was never an issue for Price, as it was for Stickley, because the number of identical pieces the former produced was limited and, within that small number, significant variations occurred either by design or by accident of handwork. Price did not equate originality with creative integrity; he reserved progressive ideas for experiments in living rather than for crafts design. Price believed he was in the process of perfecting a solution. From our perspective in a future he could not have possibly anticipated, we can see modernity in his architecture if not in his furniture. The style and structure of the completed Wheeler house have the simple, solid shapes and new materials of the twentieth century, which replace references to the antique such as the post-and-beam construction, half-timbering, elaborate cut stone, and hand-carved woodwork found at the nineteenth-century Louis Clarke house.
William Price furniture designs may be a dead end on a linear time line that requires progressive modernity to move forward, but the short life of his Rose Valley shop does not represent a failure of his ideas or those of the Arts and Crafts movement. The theory of evolution does not invalidate that which does not evolve, and study of Price’s furniture helps codify and define his moment in the history of style.
