Rug Designer Helen R Albee

Illustration: Helen R Albee. Hooked rug design in two tones of chocolate and brown, with sketchy motifs  in apple green, 1906.

Helen Albee was by no means the inventor of hooked rugs, but she was able to take an indigenous rural craft medium found in New England, and turn it into a highly successful design orientated venture that proved to be one of the most popular of the American rug making schemes seen at the beginning of the twentieth century.

These Abanakee rugs as they became known were derived from work that had traditionally been produced by the farming communities of New Hampshire. Odd scraps of fabric from worn out clothing were cut into strips and then drawn through rough canvas with hooks, hence the name hooked rugs. Many were produced in rural communities through necessity. They were often crude and were strictly produced for domestic consumption. It was Albee who had the foresight to notice that if the rugs were produced with an element of design and with a careful choice of both fabric and colour, an extra income could conceivably be procured for local farm women who were the original producers of the hooked rugs. These were often women with no outlet for financial betterment and were from families and communities that often struggled to make ends meet.

Illustration: Helen R Albee. Hooked rug design in green, red, orange, brown and black, 1906.

Albee reorganised and to a large extent, reinvented the hooked rug. She no longer used redundant second hand fabrics, but dyed her own, producing large amounts of subtly graduated tones using a number of colours, all of which were used in order to both blend and harmonise the finished rugs to both their compositions and their larger interior surroundings.

The rugs went through a series of decorative incarnations, but eventually Albee settled on forms that followed some of the geometrical elements of oriental and Native American formats. However, she was always careful not to follow these recognisably decorative formats too closely as she felt that indigenous originality was much more important than the copying of successful international styles that obviously belonged to other cultures and regions. 

Illustration: Helen R Albee. Hooked rug design in apple green, 1906.

Albee and her endeavour proved to be extremely successful both creatively and financially. Her locally produced craft rugs fitted comfortably into the framework provided by the American Arts & Crafts movement, with Albee and her rugs featuring more than once in Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman magazine. Unfortunately, the illustrations shown in this article, although actually from one of The Craftsman features, were originally produced in black and white, therefore none of the subtleties of the rugs colour tones can be seen. However, the compositional design work is impressive and shows that Albee clearly understood both the medium and some relatively progressive ideas concerning the effect that could be achieved with particular attention to colour gradation and minimal pattern intrusion. I have included a description of the colours that were originally intended for each of the designed rugs. These descriptions can be seen under each illustration shown in this article.

Illustration: Helen R Albee. Hooked rug design in red and blue, 1906.

Albee, through her own strength of character and belief in the merit of the medium of hooked rugs, or at least her belief in what she thought was conceivably possible to achieve, produced an independent and wholly unique example of American homegrown craft. It was individuals of the calibre of Albee that helped to structure the uniqueness that was such an important element of the American Arts & Crafts movement. A movement that may well have had its origins in that of British Arts & Crafts, but was to produce a whole range of indigenous craft mediums that were rooted deep in the American experience and, as in Albee's decorative rugs, helped to give character and focus to the movement.

Illustration: Helen R Albee. Hooked rug design, 1904.

Helen Albee's popular book Abnakee Rugs was produced at the height of her success and gives some interesting insights into her abilities and her judgements as far as American homegrown crafts are concerned.

Further reading links:
Abnakee Rugs
Rug Hooking in Maine 1838-1940
The Rug Hooker's Bible: The Best from 30 Years of Jane Olson's Rugger's Roundtable [With Pattern]
Pictorial Hooked Rugs
The Complete Book of Rug Hooking
Rags to Rugs: Hooked and Handsewn Rugs of Pennsylvania
Hooked Rugs: An American Folk Art
Creating an Antique Look in Hand-hooked Rugs (Framework)
Hooked Rugs: History and the Continuing Tradition
Geometric Hooked Rugs: Color and Design (Framework)
Hooked on Wool: Rugs, Quilts, And More
American Hooked and Sewn Rugs: Folk Art Underfoot
The Rug Hook Book: Techniques, Projects And Patterns For This Easy, Traditional Craft
The lore and lure of hooked rugs,
Celebration of Hand-hooked Rugs (Rug Hooking)
Rug Art - Rescued From Oblivion: A Hooked Rug Museum of North America Research project
The Complete Guide to Collecting Hooked Rugs: Unrolling the Secrets
The Secrets of Color in Hand-Hooked Rugs: Your Complete Guide to Selecting and Choosing Color
American Hooked Rug Patterns (International Design Library)
The Americana Collection: Hooked Rugs (That Patchwork Place)

William Morris Wallpapers of the 1860s and 1870s

Illustration: William Morris. Daisy wallpaper, 1864.

William Morris's first wallpaper designs started to appear in the 1860s. They came as a slightly later edition to the textile designs. Morris himself was not a big fan of wallpaper for interiors. He much preferred the idea of using hung textile work, such as tapestry or heavy fabrics framed as panels, which he saw as more traditional for interiors than the fairly recent wallpaper industry. Another reason was the difficulty in achieving a good and faithful reproduction of initial design work. Morris was a definite perfectionist and was not prepared to take on a medium if the results were to be less than perfect.

However, he was aware of the strong Victorian interest in wallpaper for financial and hygienic reasons, and though not always a pragmatist, he could usually be encouraged to when it concerned Morris & Co. It was felt increasingly in the 1860s and 1870s, that the home should be the centre of family life, but also the centre of a healthy family life. Wallpaper was seen as a much cleaner and perhaps more importantly, cheaper alternative to heavy dust laden tapestries and wall hangings.

Illustration: William Morris. Pomegranate wallpaper, 1866.

Morris's first commercial wallpaper designs, as can be seen in the first two illustrations shown in this article, Daisy and Pomegranate, were very much a case of stamped motifs on a fairly simple and plain background. Some of the motifs were actually reproduced from Morris's medieval style tapestry work, usually from incidental backgrounds or lower foregrounds where they were used to fill in spaces around the more important human figures. Incidentally, most of the figures in Morris's tapestries were produced by Edward Burne-Jones, while the backgrounds were very often Morris's own.

Both Daisy and Pomegranate were produced in the mid-1860s and reflect very much the simplicity of much of Morris's early textile work. In fact, many of the designs initially produced for textiles did end up as wallpaper patterns, with very few changes in the design, if any.

Today many would see this as a great opportunity to co-ordinate both textile and wallpaper so that a room would contain only one design throughout. However, Victorians would have been puzzled by this notion and would have seen it as a clear lack of imagination. They were more than happy to have up to half a dozen different designs within the same room, so there was little problem of the same Morris design in textile and wallpaper ending up next to each other.

Illustration: William Morris. Larkspur wallpaper, 1872.

By the 1870s Morris wallpaper design work had become much more accomplished,, confident and therefore much more complex. There is very little, if any plain background to be seen, and whereas the earlier examples were largely independently stamped on to a surface, the later examples are clearly intertwined with each other, making it difficult to see any obvious motifs.

The last three designs shown, Larkspur, Pimpernel and Chrysanthemum were all produced in the 1870s. They clearly show the confidence in the design work and the medium, and are therefore much more fluid and free form than the earlier, more tentative work of the 1860s.

Illustration: William Morris. Pimpernel wallpaper, 1876.

It would be tempting to see some of the fluid and meandering flower stems, rich, full flowers and languid leaves, as an indication of the roots of Art Nouveau. While there is a certain similarity in some of Morris work, it is also firmly rooted within both the British Arts & Craft movement and the styles and fashions of the mid-Victorian design world.

What makes Morris wallpaper design work stand out from others of the same era is the intensity of the compositions. There is a real observational passion for the natural world that is missing from so much of Victorian floral derived work. To Morris, these designs could not just be interpreted as 'pretty', or 'attractive', they were much more. They were indeed part of his life's work and passion. They were a record of the British traditional rural landscape, one of nature and human in a harmonic symbiosis. The intertwining of much of his floral work could be interpreted as a framework in which we are all a part, which is one of the reasons that Morris disliked geometry as a design tool, as he interpreted it as a man-made system for trying to quantify the natural world, rather than allowing the natural world to quantify itself.

Illustration: William Morris. Chrysanthemum wallpaper, 1877.

Of Morris's numerous passions and interests and his considerable and varied output of work, he will probably be commonly remembered for his nature based design work. These wallpapers of the 1860s and 1870s reflect an achievement, in not only wallpaper design but also design in general, that has rarely been matched or bested.

Further reading links:
William Morris: Patterns & Designs (International Design Library)
Designs of William Morris (Phaidon Miniature Editions)
William Morris Full-Color Patterns and Designs (Pictorial Archives)
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Home
William Morris and Morris & Co.
V&A Pattern: William Morris (Hardcover with CD)
News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)
The well at the world's end, a tale
William Morris (Temporis)
William Morris Tree of Life 20"x20"
William Morris on Art and Socialism
William Morris: A Life for Our Time
The Essential William Morris Anthology (12 books)
V&A Pattern: William Morris: (Hardcover with CD)
William Morris and Morris & Co
"Trellis" Wallpaper Design, 1864 Giclee Poster Print by William Morris, 36x48