The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life

"The best work in Arts and Crafts in America is already being produced on the Pacific Coast", proclaimed the English designer Charles R. Ashbee during a visit to the Bay Area in 1909. The accuracy of his praise is made vividly clear by this handsome publication, whiCh celebrates the beauty, skill, variety, and exuberance of the Arts and Crafts objects and architecture created in California during a brief but intensely prolific period between about 1895 and 1930. Inspired by the state's spectacular scenery, by its distinctive flora and fauna, and by its romantic past, the artists and artisans of California produced a unique variant of the Arts and Crafts movement. This ground-breaking book - which accompanies a major exhibition organized by The Oakland Museum - takes as its starting point the movement's ideal of "the good life", in which the virtues of simple living and high thinking were complemented by material well-being. Enlightening and entertaining essays by eight astute scholars present new information and insights about Arts and Crafts architecture and urban planning, garden design, interiors and resorts, tiles, pottery, metalwork, and furniture. Thoughtful introductory and closing essays analyze the movement and its visual and conceptual legacies in the context of that beguilingly idealistic era. Concluding the book are information-rich endnotes and a carefully focused bibliography, plus extensive artists' biographies and company histories that will be of particular interest to both scholars and collectors.