Join us for a fascinating Virtual Lunchtime Lecture with ASHM Curator, Christopher Malone, for an in-depth look at life and artwork of Karl von Rydingsvärd.
This virtual lecture will chronicle the life of woodworker and furniture designer, Karl von Rydingsvärd. Von Rydingsvärd taught women how to carve and build furniture using the Swedish slöjd educational method, and had his most prolific period of furniture-making when he worked between his studio in Manhattan and his home and summer school in Brunswick, Maine. In the pantheon of artists, architects, and designers who contributed to the Arts and Crafts movement, Karl von Rydingsvärd’s work is vastly understudied except by the few collectors and museums who have one or two pieces in their collections. Von Rydingsvärd had a prodigious career after immigrating to America in 1883. He first worked for Herter Brothers and then for A.H. Davenport where he honed his woodworking skills before setting off on his own in Boston. Rydingsvärd founded the Boston Arts and Crafts School where he successfully taught students how to identify the right kinds of wood for carving, and he taught them how to tell stories and evoke the past through furniture adorned with flowers, dragons, knot patterns, and other mythical birds and beasts. Karl von Rydingsvärd was integral to the spread of the Arts and Crafts movement in America through the students he taught, the work they produced, and the furniture commissions he took at the end of his life that still resonate with us today.
This program is presented via Zoom. The lecture will be recorded and made available to view for two weeks after the date of the program.