Mission style furniture

The term mission furniture was first popularized by Joseph P. McHugh of New York, a furniture manufacturer and retailer who copied these chairs and offered a line of stylistically related furnishings by 1898.

[1] Mission style is a design that emphasizes simple horizontal and vertical lines and flat panels that accentuate the grain of the wood (often oak, especially quartersawn white oak).

People were looking for relief after the excesses of Victorian times and the influx of mass-produced furniture from the Industrial Revolution.

[2] The furniture maker Gustav Stickley produced Arts and Crafts movement furniture often referred to as being in the Mission Style, though Stickley dismissed the term as misleading.

This was plain oak furniture that was upright, solid, and suggestive of entirely handcrafted work, though in the case of Stickley and his competitors, was constructed within a factory by both machine and handworking techniques.