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Ten letters from Frank Lloyd Wright to Charles Robert Ashbee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Alan Crawford
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Extract

The friendship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Robert Ashbee [Fig. 40a] has often been noticed in connection with Ashbee’s introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright: Aüsgefuhrte Bauten. The following letters, found in Ashbee’s journals, add to our knowledge of this friendship; and perhaps to a sense of its intellectual complexity.

Ashbee first met Wright at some time in late November or early December 1900. He was impressed, and wrote in his journal:

Wright is to my thinking far & away the ablest man in our line of work that I have come across in Chicago, perhaps in America. He not only has ideas, but the power of expressing them, & his Husser house over which he took me, showing me every detail with the keenest delight, is one of the most beautiful and the most individual of creations that I have seen in America. He threw down the glove to me in characteristic Chicagoan manner in the matter of Arts & Crafts & the creations of the machine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 13 , 1970 , pp. 64 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1970

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References

Notes

1 Berlin, 1911. The connection between Wright and Ashbee was noticed in e.g. Pevsner, N. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s Peaceful Penetration of Europe’, The Architects’ Journal Ixxxix (1939), pp.731–734 Google Scholar; Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), pp.145, 147Google Scholar; and in Kaufmann, Edgar Jr’s introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright: The early work (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

2 The Ashbee Journals, Dec. 1900. The forty volumes of Ashbee’s Journals are kept at King’s College, Cambridge. Besides the letters and references given in this article, there are letters from, and material relating to, Catherine Lloyd Wright Sr. All the relevant material is indexed in the Library under ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’.

In the present article no attempt has been made to correct mis-spellings, repeated or omitted words, loose punctuation & c. Editorial remarks have been inserted where words were found hard to read or illegible. For reasons of space, it has been necessary to omit the least important passages. Where these are more than conventional expressions, they have been paraphrased. One letter, of 31 March 1910 and part of letters of 8 & 24 July 1910 have also been omitted, as permission to quote them was not given.

A short account of Ashbee’s career was given by Burrough, B. G. in The Connoisseur clxxii (1969), pp. 85–90 & 262-266.Google Scholar

3 Should We Stop Teaching Art? (1911) and Where the Great City Stands (1917).

4 The National Trust appears in Wright’s An Autobiography (New York, 1933) as ’the Natural Trust for planes of historic interest and natural beauty,…’ (p. 165).

5 Cutting from a Chicago paper, probably The Chicago Tribune, Ashbee Journals, March 1901.

5 Cutting from a Chicago paper, probably The Chicago Tribune, Ashbee Journals, March 1901.

6 Ashbee Journals, 3 Jan. 1902. © 1970, F.L.W.F.

7 In Vol. III of ‘The Ashbee Collection’, a set of photograph albums kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum, there is a cutting of the heading of what may be the article referred to. It reads: ‘Arts and Crafts in England / By C. R. Ashbee / A Brief Sketch of the Development of the Movement by a Distinguished Architect and Craftsman.’ Neither the name nor the date of the magazine is on the cutting.

8 Architectural Review ix (1901), pp. 172–176 Google Scholar. On Ashbee’s piano the black keys were replaced by purple ones.

9 Ashbee Journals, 24 Oct. 1908. © 1970, F.L.W.F. This letter is addressed ‘To Mr. C. R. Ashbee, London, England. October 24 - 1908’ and is on Wright’s special vellum-like paper, with the brown and red square and Oak Park address.

10 London and Campden, Glos., 1908.

11 Ashbee Journals, 25 Dec. 1908.

12 Ashbee Journals, © 1970, F.L.W.F. 3 Jan. 1909. This letter is addressed to ‘Mr. C. R. Ashbee / Stanford University / California / January 3 - 1909’ and written on Wright’s special paper.

13 Ashbee Journals, 31 March 1910. © 1970, F.L.W.F.

14 Ashbee Journals, 13 April 1910. This entry is a pencil version of a letter to Wright. It is not clear whether it is a rough draft or a copy of the letter sent. Ashbee often kept such versions of his letters when he was writing on subjects or to people he thought were important.

15 Ashbee Journals, 8 July 1910. © 1970, F.L.W.F.

16 Mr Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer kindly checked the archives at Taliesin West for me, but found no reference to this work.

17 Ashbee Journals, 14 July 1910. Version of a letter from Ashbee to Wright.

18 Ashbee Journals, 24 July 1910. © 1970, F.L.W.F. For Ashbee in Florence, see Woolf, Virginia, Roger Fry (1940), p. 71 Google Scholar.

19 Berlin. The introduction by Frank Lloyd Wright is dated 1910.

20 I do not know why this separate issue was made. Perhaps Wright did attempt to take the ‘Sonderheft’ out of Wasmuth’s hands, and a compromise was reached, Wasmuth issuing the number in the series as planned, but also producing a separate issue for Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: Ausgeführte Bauten was re-issued in 1968 as Frank Lloyd Wright: The early work (New York, Introduction by Edgar Kaufmann Jr). In this edition Ashbee’s introduction has been printed from the ‘original English text, which, in the German edition, appeared only in German translation’ (publisher’s note). Part of the introduction, however, is printed in German, because it was ‘not included in C. R. Ashbee’s original text’ (p. 9). This part contains remarks on Japanese influence on Wright. Possibly Ashbee revised his original text following Wright’s letter of 26 Sept., and so this part of the introduction was separated from the rest and not preserved with it. I do not know of any reason for supposing that the part printed in German in 1968 was not by Ashbee.

References below to Ashbee’s introduction are to the 1968 edition.

21 Ashbee Journals, 26 Sept. 1910. © 1970, F.L.W.F.

22 Wright, Frank Lloyd, ‘In the Cause of Architecture’, Architectural Record xxiii (1908), pp. 155–221 Google Scholar.

23 Frank Lloyd Wright: The early work (New York, 1968), p.4.Google Scholar

24 ibid., p.8.

25 ibid., p.4.

26 ibid., p.7.

27 Ashbee Journals, 9 Feb. 1916. © 1970, F.L.W.F.

28 Ashbee Journals, 25 Feb. &14 April 1916.

29 This letter is not in the Ashbee Journals, at Cambridge. It is tipped into a copy of An Autobiography (New York, 1933) which Wright sent to Ashbee. I am grateful to Miss Felicity Ashbee for lending me this book.

30 Ashbee Journals, 11 May 1939. © 1970, F.L.WF.