A brief history of Byrdcliffe
From America’s first homegrown, coherent, and sizable group of landscape artists, that began in the I820’s now known as the Hudson River School, to the British officer who surrendered his army at Saratoga and then discoursed for the next ten minutes on the colors of mid–October foliage in the Hudson Valley, the beauty of this river valley has inspired thousands of painters, poets, photographers, and passengers traveling through its length and breadth.
At the height of the Hudson River painters’ popularity, an Englishman began a national search for a site that would serve as inspiration for artists while working and living together. So compelling were the natural wonders of the Hudson River Valley with its rolling, gentle Catskill mountains, clean air and views of the Hudson River, that Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead knew when he arrived at Mead’s Mountain House on Woodstock’s Overlook Mountain that he had found his dream site.
In 1902, on the side of Mount Guardian overlooking Woodstock, Whitehead began building his experiment for artists and craftsmen that he called “Byrdcliffe,” derived from the middle names of Whitehead and his wife, Jane Byrd McCall. Byrdcliffe, built on about 1500 acres of farmland with 30 artist cottages and studios, is significant as one of the earliest and most prominent Arts & Crafts colonies established in the United States and is now on the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture and history. Conceived, designed and constructed by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead in 1902–03 to be a model progressive craft–oriented community, Byrdcliffe has endured in that mission for nearly a century.
Whitehead was a student of John Ruskin — the most famous English art critic of his day — at Oxford and traveled with him in Italy. Whitehead was also a friend of the artist and designer William Morris as well as an admirer of Rosetti and the pre–Ralphaelites.
Whitehead had first–hand experience in establishing utopian communities in Europe prior to his arrival in the United States. Utopian experiments he felt, did not work and he preferred to call his effort a “brotherhood of artists” in his book, Grass of the Desert.
In the summer of 1903, the Byrdcliffe School of Art (today’s Byrdcliffe Theater) opened, teaching painting and decoration.
A reaction against the Industrial Revolution, Byrdcliffe brought painters, metal workers, potters, photographers, bookbinders and students in earnest to be inspired by nature and return to working by hand. The Byrdcliffe colony produced Arts & Crafts furniture, silk weavings, paintings, pottery, jewelry and metal work. Its fortunes never met Whitehead’s dream, however, and by World War I the experiment was over. Woodstock’s economic boost from these original early 20th century artists and students, however, spawned future generations that changed Woodstock’s artistic fortunes for decades to come
Following the death, in 1975, of Peter Whitehead, Ralph Whitehead’s last surviving son, the nonprofit Woodstock Guild of Craftsmen (now the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild) became Byrdcliffe’s stewards a year later and brought Byrdcliffe back to the “art that is life.” In 2003–05, the Byrdcliffe Centennial Exhibition toured major museums and produced the first scholarly catalog, Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony. Byrdcliffe, today, serves artists and students through residencies, craft classes, workshops and multi–cultural events.
