The Arms of Matthew Martin
The arms that decorate the splat of this early eighteenth-century chair were awarded, in 1722, to Captain Matthew Martin (b.1676 d.1749), of Wivenhoe, Essex.
Before the award of these arms, Captain Matthew Martin commanded a ship called the Marlborough for the East India Company. On 30th November 1711, two years before the end of ‘Queen Anne’s War’ (1702-1713), Martin set off for the East Indies and year later (late 1712) was attacked by three French ships of war. Martin fought them off (an event much lauded by contemporary commentators) and brought his ship and cargo worth £200,000 safely into Fort St. George, India.
His cunning stagey for escape from the war ships had been to cast adrift a cask in the dark with a lit lantern attached to it. The enemy had duly followed the cask in the false belief that they were in pursuit of the Marlborough, while Captain Martin made his escape in the opposite direction. For his success and service, the East India Company rewarded Martin ‘£1000 and a gold medal set round with 24 large diamonds’. The medal was an oval of gold with the Arms of the East India Company on it.
Some previous accounts of Captain Martin’s triumph have connected the much later 1722 award of a patent for arms with his brave adventures at sea, however, there was no such connection. The award of arms was the result of a private application made by Captain Martin in 1722. Royal College of Arms records show that Martin believed himself to be descended from the Family of ‘Martin of Saffron Walden’ in Essex, whose Arms had ‘three pallets Azure’ and ‘as many Martlets’. But without a proper history of his decent, Martin was not able substantiate his claim.
In such cases, the Kings of Arms were sometimes prepared to make a grant of new arms based on the old design, so in this instance, the tinctures of the arms were changed. Whereas the ancient family of Martin had three martlets (small birds) across the top of their shield, for Captain Matthew Martin’s new arms an image of the medal he was awarded by the East India was superimposed over one of the marlets. All three martlets of the original Martin arms remain in Captain Martin’s new arms, but the far left-hand bird is mostly covered by the medal so that only its tail peeps out – in a kind of three dimensional layered effect.
Martin paid the usual fee for these arms and they were officially granted by patent of John Anstis, Garter King of Arms, and John Vanbrugh, Clarenceux King of Arms, on 18 September 1722.
There is evidence that before 1722 Matthew Martin used the older crest of the Martin family, to which he had no official entitlement.
In common with many East India Company sea captains and other Company servants, Martin commissioned armorial porcelain to be made in China during his travels. The plate below, now in the British Museum, is one of the set commissioned by Captain Martin which displays the older crest – three martlets, without a medal partially covering one of them, sit along the top of each striped shield.
As well as having his new coat of arms officiated in 1722, around this time Captain Martin also had his portrait painted – the diamond studded medal he was awarded can be seen to the left by his right hand.
He had also taken possession of the family home Wivenhoe Mansion in Essex, pictured below (now demolished, most probably in the nineteenth century).
Around this time he also purchased Arlesford Hall, also in Essex (pictured below).
Furthermore, he had become heavily involved in the parliamentary and municipal matters of Essex. He was one of the Deputy-Lieutenants and a Justice of the Peace for the County. In 1721-22 he was elected to represent the borough of Colchester in Parliament. He represented Colchester for the second time 1734-35 and he held the ancient and honorable office of High Steward of Colchester. On October 4th, 1726, he was elected Mayor of the borough.
Adam Bowett has put the construction date of these CTF chairs as 1725 to 1740 – the period in which Captain Martin was most busy in Essex: buying and renovating property and getting heavily involved in county government.
It seems, perhaps in loyalty to this county, that Martin may also have had his chairs made in Essex, rather than commission them from a London maker.
The clue for this possibility is a quirk in the construction that marks these chairs out clearly from others of this type: the side rails are joined to the top rail, a bit crudely, by a lapped joint – see photograph below.
While this method of construction was perfectly serviceable as a work of joinery, it is an unusual solution when compared to other London-made chairs of this period – which are almost, without fail, constructed with a mortice and tenon joint at this juncture. According to Bowett, the lapped joint hints at a possible provincial manufacture. However, when it came to advertising his lineage on the splat of these chairs Captain Martin did not stint – with inlay that was fine and elaborate, of the highest quality for its time.
References:
College of Arms: MS Essex Pedigrees Vol. 7, pp. 118-9.
College of Arms: MS Grants 7, p. 105.
D S Howard, Chinese Armorial Porcelain (1974), p. 176.
The History of Parliament series, The House of Commons 1715-1754 (1970), ‘Martin’.
catalogue #14 copy
A Cock Fighting Chair?
by Jenny Saunt
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Chair #37
This mid eighteenth-century chair is loaded with features and gadgets, the purposes of which have caused much discussion and speculation in twentieth-century furniture histories.
Aside from its intriguing form, of narrow back and broad shoulders, the chair also has a multi-adjustable board on the back, a swing-out candle stick and pocket in either side of its shoulders and a drawer in the front of its seat.
Other chairs of this type follow the same basic format. A V&A example (below left) shares exactly the same structure of stretcher and similar appliances, while another variation (below right, from the Robin Kern Hotspur image collection) offers a different solution for the stretcher and only an adjustable back-board.
Other chairs of this type follow the same basic format. A V&A example (below left) shares exactly the same structure of stretcher and similar appliances, while another variation (below right, from the Robin Kern Hotspur image collection) offers a different solution for the stretcher and only an adjustable back-board.
A slightly later variety (below) does-away with the stretcher and seat-drawer altogether, but compensates with extra heavy-weight storage space in deeper shoulders.
Curiosity over this chair form resulted in it collecting several aliases throughout the twentieth century: a reading chair; a writing chair; and most popularly, a cock-fighting chair.
These chairs were objects of curiosity in the nineteenth-century too – one made an appearance in an 1878 illustration of the collection of George Godwin, editor of ‘The Builder’. Godwin titled the assortment below ‘Suggestive Furniture’ and displayed this collection of chairs in his London house.
In the twentieth century, ‘Cockfighting Chair’ became antique dealers name of choice for chairs of this type.
The eighteenth-century cockfight was brought vividly to life by William Hogarth, who showed spectators resting elbows on the ringside and straining forward in an atmosphere full of intent, chaos, focus and anxiety.
Hogarth even provided a portrait of a bookkeeper, whose position makes it easy to imagine how much more comfortably and stylishly accommodated he would have been in a purpose made chair – perhaps something designed specifically to support his elbows, with a rest for his open book?
Another often proposed identity for this chair type is the ‘Writing Chair’. However, eighteenth-century depictions are clear upon this matter, as can be seen below, writing required a large open surface so that the entire arm was free to move.
The fixed pad-rests of the CTF chair would have proved too restrictive for the eighteenth-century gentleman’s writing posture.
Finally, there is the possibiltiy that this was a ‘Reading chair’. Depicted reading postures of the eighteenth-century show the activity to be an upright and gentlemanly pastime of great concentration – for which a good light source was estential. Both the gentlemen shown below would have been well served by a ‘Reading Chair’.
Evidence of the eighteenth-century demonstrates that reading was the purpose for which this chair was designed. Although the cockfighting identity is appealing (and has no doubt added something to the value of these chairs over the years), sources contemporary to this chair type state clearly that it was designed as a reading chair – as can be shown in the Gillow sketch estimate books of 1794.
The costings for the drawings pictured above are clearly headed ‘A Mahogany Reading Chair’.
This title fits with a writen description of a reading chair that the designer Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) provides in The Cabinet Directory in 1803,
“intended to make the exercise of reading easy, and for the convenience of taking down a note or quotation on any subject. The reader places himself with his back to the front of the chair and rests his arms on the top yoke”.
Not as exciting as being part of a fantasy eighteenth-century cockfight, but a clear description of this chair nonetheless.
References:
V&A Reading chair W.131:1, 2-1970
Hotspur Antiques, Chair files.
- Godwin’s ‘suggestive furniture’: Susan Webster-Soros, The Secualar Furniture of E.W. Godwin, (Yale University Press (1999), p. 68.
Gillow Archive, Westminster Archive, Gillow sketch pattern books and estimate books.
Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinet Directory, 1803.
Adam Bowett, The British Chair
The chair is a universal object of the Western world. Its function is immediately apparent and its use is embedded in Western society and culture. But function and use are only part of the story, for all historic chairs are also direct links to the past, to the craftsmen who made them and the people who sat in them. This collection of one hundred chairs celebrates a wonderful diversity of British chairs, their designers, their makers, and their owners.
The human form imposes obvious constraints on chair design, so chairs of all types and periods share a few basic characteristics. For instance, since the middle of the seventeenth century, almost all British and European chairs have had a seat about 17 inches (42cm) high. This is the height at which an average person sits with his or her feet on the floor. The height of the chair, in turn, determined the height of a table, typically 28–30 inches (70–75cm) since the late seventeenth century. Given the unvarying ergonomic demands of the human form, it is remarkable to witness the variety of chair types and styles made over the centuries. This variety of chair types is also a tribute to the ingenuity and fertility of chair designers and chair makers, as well as a reflection of the changing social and aesthetic priorities of chair owners. For a chair is not just a thing for sitting on; it is an object imbued with meaning in a way that most other furniture is not.
The changing cultural role of chairs has had a profound impact on their use, and the English language has a unique way of conveying the nuances of culture and status in relation to seat furniture, because of the many different names it has for seats. The word ‘chair’ derives from the French chaise, the language of the Norman conquerors of 1066. Hence, chairs were high-status objects for important people, a notion that is explicit in contemporary descriptive terms such as ‘great chair’. In some houses there might be only one such chair, while the rest of the seats were stools. The word ‘stool’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon stol, originally meaning any chair or seat (as it still does in modern German). But Anglo-Saxon was the language of the medieval underdog, and so the word ‘stool’ was applied to low-status seats without backs or arms. The head of the household therefore used a chair, but his family and servants sat on stools.
Further nuances of status were conveyed by variations in decoration, by the quality or type of upholstery, and by size. The householder’s wife and daughters, for instance, might sit in ‘low’, ‘little’, or ‘ladies’ chairs, clearly better than stools, but not so important as a great chair. As late as 1700, chairs without arms were called backstools, a term that described both their armless form and their status relative to a chair with arms. At the opposite end of the scale were chairs of estate or thrones, which were the grandest chairs of all, larger and more richly decorated than any other. Chairs of estate were reserved for monarchs, great nobles, and prelates. Although these hierarchic distinctions have now almost completely disappeared, we nevertheless retain vestiges of old usage in modern words such as ‘chairman’, denoting the titular head of an organisation.
The history of chair design is also the history of domestic comfort. A plain board will make a seat, but a seat with a back or, better still, with a back and arms begins to afford comfort. But comfort comes at a price, and in earlier times the mere possession of a chair was a sign of ease and, by implication, of relative affluence. As late as the nineteenth century chairs were a luxury in the poorest British homes, which were often furnished only with old chairs acquired second or third hand, or seats crudely made from the cheapest materials. The wooden Windsor chair, which furnished thousands of British homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was originally devised as a garden chair for the well-todo, and only Victorian industrialisation enabled it to be made cheaply enough for working people to buy.
Upholstery adds comfort but also expense. Until the advent of cheap upholstery materials in the late nineteenth century, upholstery of any kind was disproportionately expensive because of the high cost of cloth. This was not just a matter of cloth for the top cover, but also of featherdown and horsehair, tow, wadding and webbing, fringes, and nails. In medieval times cloth, particularly rich and decorative cloth, was so valuable that fixed upholstery was a rarity. Cloth was a movable luxury, and in the form of cushions and covers it could be carried with its owner from house to house and applied to whatever wooden seat was available. The act of nailing cloth to a frame was therefore quite a statement, and the earliest British chairs with surviving original upholstery, which date from the mid-sixteenth century, are of the folding, portable type—too valuable, in other words, to leave sitting around.
The increasing incidence of upholstery in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testifies to a number of things: greater disposable wealth, cheaper consumer goods of all kinds, a more settled society, and, always, the desire for comfort. The sofa and the easy chair, two innovations of the late seventeenth century, illustrate these themes perfectly. They were both created with comfort in mind, and both were hugely expensive when first introduced. By 1800, however, sofas and easy chairs (or wing chairs as they are now called) could be found even in middle-class homes. The widespread introduction of the coiled upholstery spring in the early nineteenth century, together with mass-produced cotton and other coverings, ultimately brought upholstered comfort within the reach of all but the poorest. In the twentieth-first century almost nobody sits on plain wooden seats, and every home has its cushioned three-piece suite.
Construction has a significant impact on chair design. Primitive or hedgerow chairs were made by unskilled workmen with a minimum of tools, and the result was usually both crude and uncomfortable. In skilled hands, however, ‘primitive’ construction could achieve real sophistication. The unique style of a Windsor chair arises directly from its structure, using the seat as the principal structural member into which all other parts are fixed. This is not joinery, nor is it turnery, although a lathe was often used. It has more in common with wheelwright’s work than any other trade.
A chair made by a turner looked different from one made by a joiner because of the different tools and methods used to work the wood. The speed and simplicity of the turner’s work allowed a high output, but the range of designs he could produce was limited. The joiner had a much greater number and variety of tools capable of accurately shaping wood and jointing it precisely. A joined chair was therefore a more sophisticated object, visually related by its structure to a host of other household objects also produced by the joiner—beds, tables, cupboards, doors, fireplaces, and panelling. As chair design moved away from the boxy formality of the early seventeenth century towards the more curvaceous forms of the late seventeenth century baroque, so the joiner combined with the turner and the carver to create highly wrought frames for rich upholstery. Chair-making thus became a trade in itself, distinct both from routine joinery and from cabinet-making. Thomas Sheraton remarked: ‘Chair-making is a branch generally confined to itself . . . it requires a particular turn in the handling of shapes, to make them agreeable and easy’.
In stylistic terms British chairs developed within the wider context of European art and design—and France, in particular—was highly influential. The plain British backstool was derived from French chairs of the early seventeenth century, and the later seventeenth century horsebone or scrolled-leg chair was a development of a fashionable fauteuil that emerged in Paris in the 1670s. But Britain also made some original contributions to European chair design; the cane chair, developed in London in the 1660s, achieved enormous popularity in Continental Europe and North America, and London’s cane-chair makers claimed that about one-third of their production was exported. Although this may be an exaggeration, there is no doubting the cane chair’s success as a British innovation—in some European countries they were known simply as ‘English chairs’. Another highly significant British design, created in the early eighteenth century, was the chair we now know as the Queen Anne chair, more properly called the ‘banister-back’ or ‘India-back’ chair. This was a synthesis of British, French, and Chinese elements that combined strength, simplicity, elegance, and comfort in one harmonious whole. It was widely copied in Europe and North America, and Queen Anne chairs are still made today.
With the advent of the Gothic Revival in the early nineteenth century Britain moved to the forefront of European art and design. In the eighteenth century ‘Gothic’ had been merely a decorative concept, a variation on the more common French and Chinese styles of the mid-century rococo, but in the nineteenth century it became a national passion, underpinned by a strong religious and moral philosophy. Although much Gothic Revival furniture was derivative, the best was revolutionary and, ironically, entirely modern in its robust simplicity. The Reformed Gothic style championed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) laid the foundation for the Arts and Crafts movement of the later nineteenth century, perhaps the most influential British design school of all. Arts and Crafts, together with its predecessors the Gothic Revival and the Aesthetic Movement, transformed attitudes and ideas both in Britain and abroad, and produced genuine innovation. This happened because furniture design was taken out of the hands of furniture-makers and given to professional architects and designers, men such as Christopher Dresser (1834–1904), E.W. Godwin (1833–1886), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), and Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941). Unconstrained by traditional approaches to materials and construction, these visionaries created radical new forms that paved the way for Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and even Modernism.
Arts and Crafts had two faces, one radical and the other traditional. For some practitioners ‘Craft’ was more important than ‘Art’; they believed that only through a return to traditional crafts skills, using traditional materials, could a true revolution in design be achieved. The Cotswold School regarded truth to materials and construction as fundamental to good design. One of its chief sources of inspiration was the vernacular furniture of the British countryside, especially the simple rush-seated chairs made by local chair-makers.
The critical and commercial success of the Cotswold style spawned a host of imitators, with the consequence that alongside genuinely talented and original designers such as Ernest Gimson (1864–1919) and Voysey there arose a host of copyists who sentimentalised furniture design into a maudlin pastiche of Olde England. Amazingly, some are still working successfully today, but a clumsy, ugly chair remains ugly and clumsy, even if handmade, and adding a carved mouse does not make it any more attractive.
Some twentieth-century Arts and Crafts designers attempted to marry the high production standards and vernacular style of the Cotswold School with the new possibilities of the machine age. Ambrose Heal (1872-1959) and Gordon Russell (1892-1980) both had considerable success in this vein, but in the aftermath of the industrialised slaughter of the First World War their designs seemed, to some, sentimental and regressive. To anyone who admired Marcel Breuer’s (1902-1981) Wassily Chair, Gerrit Rietveld’s (1888-1965) Red-Blue Chair, or Mies van der Rohe’s (1886-1969) Barcelona Chair, Russell’s ladder-backs simply looked quaint.
Surely, the more profound legacy of the Arts & Crafts movement came from its radical face, from the nineteenth century architects and designers for whom aesthetics were more important than craft. Beginning in the early 1880’s, new art forms, inspired by nature, emerged in Britain and spawned a style we call Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau is now considered a transitional period between the largely revival and traditional nineteenth century styles and the modernist designs of the twentieth century.
In the second half of the twentieth century tubular steel, aluminium, moulded wood, fibreglass, and plastic dominated fashionable chair design. Working in wood seemed wilfully retardataire. British designers such as Robin Day (1915-2010) responded to the new age with great success, and more than twenty million of his metal and polypropelene stacking chairs have been made. There were some, however, who refused to sign up to the Modernist agenda and who, furthermore, thought that wood’s full potential had yet to be realised. John Makepeace (b.1939) was one of those, and since the 1970s he has been pushing the boundaries of wooden chair design. With each new chair he causes us to reconsider the structural and aesthetic properties of wood without losing sight of the ergonomic essentials of the form. Makepeace’s chairs combine imaginative design, superlative craftsmanship, and technical innovation; he is the most prominent of today’s furniture designers and makers taking British chair-making into the twenty-first century.
Christopher Dresser
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Christopher Dresser
Dr. Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) was a prodigious Victorian designer of applied arts: objects for household use and decoration. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s earliest independent industrial designers. Over a period of nearly forty years, Dresser was connected to many different British manufacturers and created designs in a diverse range of materials.
Dresser was born in Glasgow. In 1847 he entered the Government School of Design in London, where he came under the spell of the outstanding designer and design theorist, Owen Jones (1809–1874). In 1856 Dresser provided a plate for Jones’s seminal The Grammar of Ornament. In 1859 he received a doctorate in botany from Jena University in Thuringia, Germany. Although he did not pursue an academic career in botany for long, lessons drawn from his botanical studies would be profoundly significant to his career as a designer.
Throughout his life, Dresser lectured and published on design. His book, The Art of Decorative Design, was published in 1862, as was Development of Ornamental Art in the International Exhibition, an analysis of good and bad design at that year’s World’s Fair, held in London. Dresser’s book, Japan, Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (1882) recalls his significant and influential trip to that country in 1876–77. Arguably his most important publication was Principles of Decorative Design, published in 1873.
In 1858 Dresser created designs for Jackson & Graham (c.1840–85), the cabinetmaker that manufactured Owen Jones–designed furniture for its great patron Alfred Morrison (1821–1897). From 1862 Dresser designed for Minton (ceramics), by 1866 for Wedgwood (ceramics), and from the following year for Green and Nephew (glass), and Coalbrookdale (cast iron). With specific regard to manufacturers represented in this catalogue, Dresser’s relationship with Benham & Froud probably began around 1872, with Hukin & Heath in 1877, with Linthorpe and James Dixon in 1879, with Perry in 1883, with Elkington in 1885, with James Couper in 1888, and with Ault in 1890.
In November of 1904 Christopher Dresser traveled on
business to Mulhouse, France. He died during this trip and was buried
in Mulhouse.
Christopher Dresser Further Reading: A Selected Bibliography
By Dresser
(arranged by publication date)
Books
The Art of Decorative Designs (London: Day & Son, 1862).
The Development of Ornamental Art in the International Exhibition (London: Day & Son, 1862).
Principles of Decorative Design (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1873).
Studies in Design (London: A. Goater in Nottingham, 1874).
Japan, Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures (London/New York: Longmans, Green, and Co./Scribner and Welford, 1882).
Modern Ornamentation (London: B. T. Batsford, 1886).
Articles
“The Art of Decorative Design,” Builder (1862).
“On Decorative Art,” Planet (1862).
“The Paris Exhibition, 1867,” Chromolithograph (1867–68).
“Ornamentation Considered as High Art,” Journal of the Society of Arts 19 (1871).
“Eastern Art and Its Influence on European Manufactures and Taste,” Journal of the Society of Arts 22 (1874).
On Dresser
(arranged alphabetically by author)
Books
Michael Collins, Christopher Dresser, 1834–1904, exh. cat. (London: Camden Arts Centre, 1979–80).
Richard Dennis and John Jesse, Christopher Dresser, 1834–1904, exh. cat. (London: Fine Art Society, 1972).
Stuart Durant, Christopher Dresser (London/Berlin: Academy Editions/Ernst & Sohn, 1993).
Widar Halén, Christopher Dresser (Oxford: Phaidon, 1990).
Rüdiger Joppien, Christopher Dresser, Ein Viktorianischer Designer, 1834–1904, exh. cat. (Cologne: Kunstgewerbemuseum, 1981).
Harry Lyons, Christopher Dresser: The People’s Designer, 1834–1904 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2005).
Christopher Morley, Dresser’s Decorative Design ([England]: Beresford C, 2010).
Judy Rudoe, Decorative Arts, 1850–1950: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection (London: British Museum Press, 1991).
Michael Whiteway, ed., Christopher Dresser: A Design Revolution, exh. cat. (London: V & A Publications, 2004).
Articles
Francesca Vanke Altman, “‘We May Borrow What Is Good from All Peoples’: Christopher Dresser and Islamic Art,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 42–52.
Anonymous, “The Work of Christopher Dresser,” Studio XV (1898): 104–14.
Isabelle Anscombe, “‘Knowledge is Power’: The Designs of Christopher Dresser,” Connoisseur 207 (May 1979): 54–59.
Shirley Bury, “The Silver Designs of Dr. Christopher Dresser,” Apollo (Dec. 1962).
Stuart Durant, “Christopher Dresser and the Use of Contemporary Science,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 22–29.
Charlotte Gere, “Dr. Christopher Dresser: A Commercial Designer in the Victorian Art World,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 8–22.
Bernard Jacqué, “The Death of Christopher Dresser in Mulhouse,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 97–102.
Charles Newton, “Dresser and Owen Jones,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 30–41.
Ken Tadishi Oshima, “The Evolution of Christopher Dresser’s ‘Art Botanical’
Depiction of Nature,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 53–65.
Nikolaus Pevsner, “Pioneers of the XIXth Century: Christopher Dresser,” Architectural Review (1937): 183–86.
Peter Rose, “Christopher Dresser: From Design to Retail in the Late 19th Century,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 84–96.
Judy Rudoe, “Design and Manufacture: Evidence from the Dixon & Sons Calculation Books,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 66–83.
David A. Taylor, “More on Dresser in the United States,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 103–11.
David A. Taylor with Charlotte Gere, “‘The Dadocracy’ and other Humorous Reactions to ‘Aesthetic’ Interior Decoration,” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 29 (2005): 112–17.
Adrian Tilbrook, “Christopher Dresser’s Designs for Elkington & Co.,” Journal of the Society of Decorative Arts 9 (1985): 23–28.
WEBSITES
http://www.christopherdresser.co.uk/index.html
http://www.dormanmuseum.co.uk/WWW2/index.html
Why Is Christopher Dresser So Admired?
Writing in Architectural Review in 1937, the German-born architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983), by then living in London, noted, “While engaged in research on the origins of the Modern Movement quite by chance I came across the name and two isolated examples of the work of Christopher Dresser.” The works to which Pevsner referred, and which he illustrated in the article, are electroplated nickel silver and glass cruets manufactured by Hukin & Heath of Birmingham around 1878 (figs. 1–2). These practical objects represent a stark contrast to the fussy production that was a feature of so much mid-nineteenth-century British manufacture. Such pieces are invariably seen today as anticipating the functional, pared-down aesthetic that typifies the work of designers who followed: Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), Christian Dell (1893–1974), Marianne Brandt (1893–1983), and others. But as much as Dresser is admired for his protomodern aesthetic, he was also a typically curious Victorian with an informed knowledge of historic sources and an understanding of color and texture. This catalogue illustrates some of the apparently contrasting, but in fact complementary, elements of his work.
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Figure #1
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Figure #2
The manufacturer Hukin & Heath registered the design for a claret jug (no. 28) on October 9, 1878. This model, today commonly known as the “crow’s foot decanter,” combines several recurring features from Dresser’s work, including humor. The claret jug’s avian form, with its beaklike spout and pointed feet, is a much less decorated variant of the ubiquitous decanters more obviously representing birds that graced the middle-class dining rooms of Victorian Britain (often made of ruby glass with silver-gilt mounts). In Dresser’s example, the protruding, pointed tail of a bird (here the glass body) is transformed into an abstract, symmetrical vertical: the designer has stripped away the decoration and created a form that is both practical and elegant. As with many of Dresser’s designs, it pays to imagine this as a simple silhouette.
Since Pevsner’s publication of Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936), which included a discussion of Dresser’s work, and his Architectural Review article (1937), the designer has been held in increasingly high esteem. There were twenty works by Dresser in the important Exhibition of Victorian & Edwardian Decorative Arts mounted at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 1952. On that occasion, the “Claret Jug (Height 10 in.) glass, mounted with silver lid handle and feet,” as referenced in the exhibition’s catalogue, may have been a “crow’s foot decanter”. Dresser has now also been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions, beginning with Christopher Dresser, mounted by Richard Dennis, John Jesse, and the Fine Art Society in 1972. This was followed by the designer’s first noncommercial exhibition, Christopher Dresser, 1834–1904, held at the Camden Arts Centre in 1979. In 2001 ‘Christopher Dresser: A Designer at the Court of Queen Victoria’ was mounted in Milan, and the following year Christopher Dresser and Japan toured four Japanese museums, taking the designer’s work to a country that he had visited and that had been a considerable source of inspiration for him.
More recently the Cooper Hewitt, New York, and Victoria and Albert Museum mounted Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser’s Design Revolution (2004), an authoritative appraisal of the designer’s work. Dresser’s production in many media—ceramics, furniture, glass, metalwork (silver, electroplated nickel silver, painted tin, and cast iron), textiles, and wallpaper—is now represented in museum and private collections across the globe. There is no longer any question of his internationally accepted reputation as the leading “Viktoiranischer Designer,” as a 1980 monographic exhibition mounted at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Cologne, called him.
In later life, Dresser’s significance and originality were admired in the pages of The Studio (founded 1893), published by his friend and sometime collaborator Charles Holme. Although manufacturers such as the Linthorpe Art Pottery, James Couper, and James Dixon appear to have used Dresser’s talent as a selling point, adding his name to their makers’ marks, “The Work of Christopher Dresser,” published anonymously by The Studio in 1898, is the only tribute to the designer to appear before his death.
The Studio’s 1898 article includes twelve examples of “Clutha” glass by J. Couper & Sons, including the image of three vessels shown here (fig. 3), the center one of which is a vase of the same pattern as no. 20 in this catalogue. This remarkable, flowerlike creation is perhaps a reminder of Dresser’s training as a botanist. The metal inclusions in the body of the vase glisten like dew in the early morning light. The vase, like much of the Clutha range, retailed through the London department store Liberty & Co. (founded 1875) and was available in four sizes, ranging in height from four to eight inches. Couper was based in Glasgow, and Clutha is the Latin name for the Clyde, the river that runs through that city.
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Figure #3
Dresser often drew directly from exotic or historic sources for his glass and ceramics: the Clutha bottle-shaped vase (no. 14), for example, was derived from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Persian rose-water sprinklers. In his Principles of Decorative Design (1873), Dresser wrote, “In order that you acquire the power of perceiving art-merit as quickly as possible, you must study those works in which bad taste are really met with, you must at first consider art-objects from India, Persia, China, and Japan, as well as ancient art from Egypt and Greece.” Judy Rudoe, writing in Christopher Dresser: A Design Revolution (2004), noted that this statement “reveals in a nutshell [Dresser’s] debt to the art of ancient and contemporary civilizations alike.” In Studies in Design (1876), Dresser echoed Owen Jones in urging students “to study whatever has gone before; not with the view of becoming a copyist, but with the object of gaining knowledge, and seeking out the general truths and broad principles . . . [so that] our works should be superior to those of our ancestors, inasmuch as we can look back upon a longer experience than they could.”
The Studio article, “The Work of Christopher Dresser” also picks up on several of the designer’s themes that are recognized today. This article noted its appreciation for Dresser as “perhaps the greatest of commercial designers imposing his fantasy and invention upon the ordinary output of British industry.” In the world of design, it went on, “Dresser is in a way the figure-head of the professional . . . a household word to people interested in design,” with a talent for raising “the national level of design . . . by dealing with products within the reach of the middle classes, if not the masses themselves.” The anonymous writer also admired the practical nature of Dresser’s “designs for jugs, teapots, and other vessels for fluid, in which the position of the handle is determined by the laws of gravity, so the vessel when full could be held with the least possible strain on the muscles of the holder” (see, for example, no. 34).
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Figure #4
That Dresser designed for Benham & Froud is confirmed by the five varied examples of the firm’s work shown in The Studio article, as well as by Pevsner’s illustration of Dresser’s spherical tripod kettle (fig. 4), an example of which is also included in this catalogue (no. 36). The spherical or cauldron form, raised on three short legs, is a recurring theme in Dresser’s metalwork (see, for example, nos. 26, 29, and 34). The tripod supports, which can be seen on medieval iron cauldrons, offer stability and create lightness for the solid bodies they hold. Another distinctive feature of the copper and brass vessels designed by Dresser for Benham & Froud is the visible rivets that attach the various elements. These are evident in the designer’s Japanese-inspired kettle (no. 40) and kettle on a stand (no. 41), which can be compared to those illustrated in a photograph of Benham & Froud pieces c.1882. (fig. 5), from the Chubb archives.
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Figure #5
Dresser’s work in different media sometimes uses the same or very similar shapes. Compare, for example, an Ault earthenware vase (no. 12) with one of his Clutha vases (no. 17). Although the solid ceramic body and the translucent glass create contrasting effects, the objects are actually quite similar when considered as silhouettes. Dresser also employed ornament and glazes to create different impressions among objects with the same form. One of the Ault vases featured in this catalogue (no. 13) is part of a group of yellow-glazed vases in which form is emphasized by the strong monochrome glaze. But a different effect emerges when the same model uses other colors, more variegated glazes, or even decorated surfaces. Examples of the same Ault vase form are recorded with solid green and solid red glazes; with a streaky blue, black, and white glaze; with incised decoration; and even with a turquoise interior and pink exterior, painted with geometric decoration.
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Figure #6
Early in his career, Dresser produced some extraordinary graphic designs for vases by Wedgwood and then Minton. But the later ceramics that he designed for Linthorpe, for example those advertised in the Furniture Gazette, 1880, here fig. 6, are intriguing in different ways. Taken as a group, these pots bring together two strands of Dresser’s design: the quirky forms that were derived from both ancient prototypes and his own original creations. These sharply angled, often monochrome forms can be seen as the ceramic incarnation of his much-vaunted angular metalwork. One jug (no. 3) is directly based on a Cycladic jug of a type dating from 2200–1800 B.C., and a masked vessel (no. 9) is based on Pre-Columbian Nasca vases; other ceramics inspired by distant sources are legion, including vases based on Japanese, Egyptian, Peruvian, and English Prehistoric and Bronze Age vessels. A plain, hemispherical jug with an angular handle (no. 17) may represent the type of more idiosyncratic designs for ceramics that emanated from Dresser’s fertile imagination. In the drawings from his 1881 account books, illustrated by Pevsner (fig. 7), both these protomodernist and cross-cultural elements are clear.
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Figure #7
Despite the evident diversity displayed in the ceramics, glass, and metalware included in this catalogue, there is an equally apparent unifying element: Dresser’s eye for form. Although in his textiles and other two-dimensional works, Dresser was a prolific and original creator of ornament, in the present collection, decoration plays a secondary role to shape. The protomodern aesthetic of Dresser’s tableware and the adventurous treatments of his cross-cultural ceramics reveal the particular elements of Dresser’s eye and mind that appeal so much to our contemporary tastes. But his use of color, too, perhaps anticipates some of the playfulness of postmodernism.
Drayton Chair
by Jenny Saunt
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Chair #7
The chair above is part of a suite originally made for Drayton House in Northamptonshire. Six chairs, a settee and a bed of the same set are still at Drayton, all of which were made between 1700 and 1702.
The early life of this suite of furniture can be followed through a trail of documentary evidence, from the account books and inventories of Drayton House.
Terms for production of the needlework for this suite were defined and agreed in 1700. The excerpt below, dated ‘July the 24th 1700’, mentions the embroidery and reads: ‘is made and agreed upon for the embroidery’, and on the second line, it records the fact that the needlewomen had ‘to find silks and all other things fitting’ – meaning, it was their responsibility to provide all the materials as part of the total cost of the work.
Following this account, there are then various payments for the separate elements of this interior, such as the ‘grate curtain’ for the great bed that matched the chairs. The excerpt below reads: ‘the second grate curtane & I have too guyness in hand to begin the oth on the 12th of december’.
The needlework was provided by ‘Elizabeth Vickson’ and ‘Rebekah Dufoe’, who signed the listed payments as proof of receipt, as shown below.
The life of this set of chairs can then be followed through several household inventory records, below is an inventory description which reads: ‘elbow chairs & a settee of the same as the bed’.
Drayton’s inventories from 1710 and 1724 have been transcribed and published in full in Tessa Murdoch’s Noble Households (2006). In the 1724 inventory there is a description which reads, ‘a fine needlework bed…black elbow chairs with seats and backs of Ditto’
However, despite this wealth of archival evidence for the chairs, it is still uncertain how many of this type of chair were originally made for Drayton House. As already stated, six of the same frame design and needlework cover are currently at Drayton, but there are a further eight in the King’s dinning room there – with identical frame shape but different covers. One more is now a CTF chair and another is part of the V&A collection
Until recently, this was thought to be the whole set, but in the course of research for 100 British Chairs a letter from Phillips of Hitchen to the V&A furniture department has revealed that there are in fact four more of these chairs still in existence somewhere.
In May 1950, Phillips of Hitchen wrote to Ralph Edwards of the V&A furniture department to tell him of a ‘set of six arm chairs from Drayton House at special price of £125 to the Victoria and Albert museum’. The letter goes on to explain about the chairs’ fine ‘needlework covers’ and that they had been bought ‘many years ago’ from the owners of Drayton. Hitchens were just about to exhibit one of these chairs at the Grosvenor House fair of that year. Ralph Edwards immediately bought one of the six, which is still at the V&A along with all its documentation for purchase and delivery from Hitchens, and another of the six is the CTF chair, which still has part of the Hitchens label attached to its frame. The whereabouts of the other four that Hitchens had for sale in 1950 are currently unknown, but with six still at Drayton and six owned by Hitchens in 1950, this makes a total of twelve. Added to the eight chairs of identical frame design but different covers, still at Drayton in the King’s dinning room, the total of this frame type is twenty.
To commission a large set of imposing chairs of this type was the height of grand fashion in the late seventeenth century. Designs of Daniel Marot from this period give a good idea of the effect that was desired. Below, two of Marot’s prints for anonymous rooms of the time show highly coordinated symmetrical interiors, with formally arranged pieces: including tall centrally placed beds, flanked by imposing ranks of needlework chairs on either side.
Marot’s style had impressive theatricality and it closely resembles that of the state bedroom design at Drayton – which is shown in the smaller image below on the left.
In addition, Marot’s chair designs show the same square needlework backs as the Drayton chairs, the same sweeping curve of the arms and the ‘horsebone’ leg and fore rail.
The ‘horsebone’ element of this design has been explored by Adam Bowett in his 1999 article ‘The English ‘Horsebone’ chair 1685–1710’. Bowett untangles the origins of the English description of a ‘broken double scroll’ and investigates surviving documentary evidence for the correct dating of this type of chair.
The ‘horsebone’ is rampant throughout Marot’s work and appears repeatedly in clocks, architecture, furniture, monuments and garden design.
The needlework design prints of Marot also have a close relationship with the Drayton suite, see below.
Urns filled to bursting-point with flowers were a favorite motif with Marot and make frequent appearance in his prints.
Aside from the work of Daniel Marot, the earliest related chairs to this Drayton chair made their first appearance in print in 1687, in the ‘Enthronement of James II and Queen Mary’ (disscussed in Bowet Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740) where they were given a prominent position at the forefront of the scene.
A Dutch needlework chair – referenced by Peter Thornton with the image below – gives an indication of the original bright colouring of the needlework on the Drayton chairs.
Since being sold from Drayton in the early years of twentieth century, the CTF chair has lived its life in circumstances close to museum conditions, proctecting some of is colour. However, though the six at Drayton appear faded at first glance (below left), when their covers are turned back the orignal viberancy of the needlework colours can still can be seen on the reverse of the fabric (below right).
Furthermore, the discovery of a fragment of this needlework, shown below, which has not been exposed to light for the three hundred years since it was completed, allows a re-imagining of the original impact of the room, in fully saturated Technicolor.
References:
Bruce A. Bailey, Drayton House: Northamptonshire, (Architectural Digest, 1990).
Noble Households: Eighteenth century inventories of great English Houses, Ed. Tessa Murdoch, (John Adamson, Cambridge, 2006), pp. 117-141.
Adam Bowett, ,Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740, (Antique Collectors Club, 1988), pp. 100-105 & 237-241.
Adam Bowett, ‘The English ‘Horsebone’ chair 1685–1710’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol: CXLI, No. 1154, May 1999, pp. 263-271.
Peter Thornton, Seventeenth Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland, (Yale University Press, Newhaven and London, 1978), p. 204, 205.
Tobias Jellinek, Early British Chairs and Seats, (Antique Collectors Club, 2009), p. 145.
A Marot Chair?
by Jenny Saunt
Though previously bought and sold several times as seventeenth-century pieces, this pair of CTF chairs (only one shown here) have recently revealed their true identity as creations of the nineteenth-century.
Several significant pieces of evidence have led to this re-dating.
First, the construction technique – with screwed-in corner brackets – suggests the work of a nineteenth-century furniture maker. The un-patinated surface revealed when the brackets are removed proves they were always part of the chair’s frame and so dates the chairs to the nineteenth-century without doubt.
Second, the wood used for the original corner blocks has been identified by Adam Bowett as either birch or maple – not woods used by seventeenth or eighteenth-century English chair makers.
Third, the screws from the original corner bocks are handmade and of mid nineteenth-century origin – confirmed by the cut across the top, which is uneven in depth and off-centre.
Finally, in an attempt to put an absolutely certain date on these chairs they have recently been carbon dated. Unfortunately the results of the carbon dating were not conclusive, but one of the more likely periods in which this timber was originally cut does tally with the chair being constructed in the nineteenth century.
Chairs of this type have frequently been referred to as ‘Marot chairs’ – a reference to the seventeenth and eighteenth-century designs of Daniel Marot and the style of decoration on the chair’s carved splat (compared to Marot’s prints below).
The name ‘Marot’ is also connected to the date of production for some of these chairs. For example, at Hampton Court there is a large set of seventeenth-century chairs almost identical in design to the nineteenth-century CTF chairs. Two of the Hampton Court chairs are pictured below.
With a passing glance, the CTF chair (below left) is very similar to the Hampton Court set (below right).
However, a close comparison reveals the differences more clearly.
On the Hampton Court chair-backs there is a more nipped-in waist, the curve of the splat is fuller, all of the curves in the chair are very slightly rounder and fuller, and the style of the carving is looser. Besides these differences, the patina of the Hampton Court chair is clearly that of an older chair, with pitting, staining, dents and chips. There are even places where whole sections of decoration have been broken off this set through more than 300 years of use.
The nature of the carving on the Hampton Court chair provides more interesting comparisons, it is heavily marked with the traces of the tools that made it and in a strong sidelight these reveal themselves clearly.
Furthermore, the blocking-out pieces which have been added to the front face of the chair, at points of high-relief decoration, are in line with late seventeenth/eighteenth-century modes of construction.
In the image below, a faint line can be seen running horizontally across – between the most projecting parts of the decoration and the main frame. This indicates where additional blocks have been glued onto the frame to enable the carver to make ornament with greater projection.
When compared directly with the seventeenth-century Hampton Court chairs, the clean finish of the CTF ‘Marot’ chairs looks too pristine. Nevertheless, the CTF chairs are still an excellent example of the best nineteenth-century furniture making and are also part of the historicist turn outlined by Adam Bowett’s introduction to this subject.
Despite it now seeming obvious that this pair of CTF chairs are nineteenth-century pieces, such chairs have for a long time been published in furniture history books and discussed as examples of late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century furniture making.
There are several design variations in the nineteenth century versions. For instance, the CTF Marot chairs have an indentation in the underside centre of the front seat rail, which suggests they were once decorated with a scalloped front edge – like the two chairs shown below.
Though these two chairs look similar, the outline of the splat reveals they are different chairs – the square-ended section halfway down the side of the splat is different in each.
For other design alternatives, an internet search for ‘Marot chair’ throws up many variations on the theme (see below), but without examination it’s impossible to say which of the chairs below are actually the seventeenth-century pieces they all claim to be.
The 1880 photograph below shows a ‘Marot chair’ prominently displayed in a showcase fashionable interior and it is possible that the date of this image provides a clue to a period of prolific production for this chair type.
However, this is a chair design of long standing appeal because, in addition to the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century examples of the chair already considered, it was also in production in the twentieth century.
The photograph of the Saddlers Hall, below, showcases a set of these chairs which were made as a gift for the guild in 1951.
So, while all chairs of this form should clearly be considered carefully for clues of dating, the one certainty of ‘Marot’ chairs is the enduring appeal of their design: a design which has motivated makers to revisit it repeatedly over the course of more than 300 years.
References:
W. Symonds, English Furniture From Charles II to George II, fig. 21, p. 42
W. Symonds, Old English Walnut and Lacquer Furniture, pl. `vi, p. 44
Maquoid & Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, Vol. i., ill. fig.82,83, p.253
Edwards, M. Jourdain, Georgian Cabinet Makers, rev edn., 1962 p.126, pl. 10
Lenygon, Furniture in England from 1660 to1760, rev edn., 1924, p.41
Adam Bowett, ,Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740, (Antique Collectors Club, 1988), p. 164
Herbert Cesinsky, English Furniture of the Eighteenth century, Vol. 1, p. 52
Lucy Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 2 Vols, (Yale university Press/National Museums Liverpool, 2008), p. 1022, 1033 (similar chairs)
Lyttleton Chairs
by Jenny Saunt
This is one of a pair of CTF chairs that were originally from a larger set of at least 12 chairs. The two in the CTF collection are marked with the numbers II and IV, and with the exception of numbers III and IX, all the others of the set are currently traceable.
Described as an ‘Indian Chair’ in the early eighteenth century trade card below, the design is notable for its slim elongated back – which from the side-view makes a sinuous curve.
It was a form of chair much depicted in fashionable and aspirational interior paintings of the period:
The chairs pictured below show other examples of this type: they are close in date to the CTF chairs and all have similar elongated curved backs, cabriole legs, also inlay and carving on the frames, large ornamented ears on the knees of the legs and decorative cut-outs in the splat or top rail.
The needlework seats of the two CTF ‘Indian’ chairs bear the crest of the Lyttleton family of Arley castle. When the Lyttletons sold Arley Castle and much of its contents in 1852, six chairs of this set were listed in the sale catalogue.
The Woodward family, who bought Arley Castle, bought these six chairs. Over one hundred years later, in the 1990s, the Woodwards sold four of the set, in two pairs. One of these pairs was the CTF pair.
The three shells of the Lyttleton’s crest are prominently displayed in the bold needlework design of these seat covers, as they are in crest’s of the families which Lyttletons married. For instance, below are several examples of crests from the Lyttleton’s intermarriage with the Townsend family of Honnington Hall.
At the time these CTF ‘Indian’ chairs were made, the main branch of the Lyttletons lived in Old Hagley, see below.
The overmantle of Old Hagley used the three-shelled crest as its principal motif and when Old Hagley was demolished this overmantle was incorporated into one at Hagley Hall.
A portrait of the Seventeenth century John Lyttleton, also on display at Hagley Hall, shows this gentleman wearing the family crest in the form of tiny beaded shell buttons.
References:
Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth Century Decoration: design and the domestic interior in England, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1993), p. 96, 105, 106.
Adam Bowett, ,Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740, (Antique Collectors Club, 1988), p. 162, 163.
- Edwards (ed.), The Dictionary of English Furniture, 3 Vols. London (1954), I, p. 255, fig. 8.
Exhibition of Art Treasures, 30th April 26th may 1928 no. 43.
- Grindley, The Bended Back Chair, London (1990), No. 16.
Exhibited Grosvenor House Antiques fair 12-22 June 1991.
Maquoid & Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, Vol. i., ill. p. 255, figs. 87, 88, 89,
Herbert Cescinsky, English Furniture of the Eighteenth century, Vol. 1, p. 54.
Carry Chair
by Jenny Saunt
Similar in form to several chairs in the Crab Tree Farm Collection (see 2, 3, and 6), this chair sets itself apart by the iron loops which are fixed to its sides. The loops were an early addition to the chair, added to make it transportable by inserting bars so that the sitter could be carried. The painting below, circa 1600-1603, from Sherborne Castle in Dorset, shows Elizabeth 1st taking part in an earlier, slightly grander version of this concept.
The Welsh Folk museum has a similar example of a carrying chair in its collections, of circa. 1680. Discussed in full by Victor Chinnery, the Welsh carrying chair has a documented history as the property of a Welsh member of parliament who won a succession of elections and was carried though the streets in a triumphant procession on the chair below.
In 1758 William Hogarth printed an image entitled ‘Chairing the members’ as part of a set of four prints on elections. In the final print of this set, below, the elected MP can be seen carried aloft on a grandly carved chair which is being supported by two poles.
References:
Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: the British tradition, (Antique Collectors Club, 1979), p. 57.
Tobias Jellinek, Early British Chairs and Seats, (Antique Collectors Club, 2009), p. 50.
The Arms of Arundell
By Jenny Saunt
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Panel-Back Chair #1
The back panel of this chair (sometimes referred to as a ‘Glastonbury chair’), bears the arms of the Arundell’s of Cornwall, the builders of Trerice, whose Cornish lineage can be traced back to the thirteenth century.
However, as furniture historian Victor Chinnery wrote, dating of furniture and ‘precise histories of ownership, even in the presence of a coat of arms’ are difficult things to decipher. Chinnery identified the arms on this chair as those of Sir John Arundell III (1495 – 1561), but was careful to explain that although the chair may have belonged to John Arundel III, it was just as likely to have been made on his death, or by one of his descendants, to commemorate his life. Therefore, the date that this chair was made could be anything from the middle years of the 1500s to the early 1600s.
John Arundell (also sometimes known as ‘Jack of Tilbury’) was a favourite of Henry VIII and served for a time as Henry’s Esquire of the body. Fittingly, this Arundell family chair currently resides in in a room of Tudor period panelling and is overlooked by a sixteenth century portrait of Henry VIII.
As a young man (in 1513) John Arundell was knighted at the Battle of the Spurs, when the cities of Tournai and Therouanne came into the hands of Henry VIII.
John served as a commander of the English Royal Navy. In 1523 he captured the notorious Scottish pirate Duncan Campbell and was summoned to bring his prisoner to court, so that he might receive the personal thanks of the king for his ‘goodly and valiant enterprise’. After the death of Henry VIII, John retained his royal favour and was made Vice Admiral of the West by Edward VI. He held this position through the reign of Queen Mary, who once wrote to him to ensure that ‘the prince of Spain be honourably entertained should he chance to land in Cornwall’.
John twice served as High Sheriff of Cornwall and died in his 67th year, in 1561.
His tomb, in Stratton parish Church, is adorned with brass plates which depict John with his family – both of his wives, his three sons, and his nine daughters.
Jack of Tilbury had lived through five consecutive reigns and served under four monarchs, impressively, he managed to stay in favour with all of them. By the end of his life John had amassed a considerable fortune and established a reputation for the family – still evident in the family seat, Trerice house in Cornwall, the interiors of which are also ornamented with the family’s arms.
References:
Regional Furniture Society Newsletter; Victor Chinnery Book Review: Tobias Jellinek Early British Chairs and Seats 1500-1700
Barry Williamson, The Arundells of Wardour, (Hobnob Press 2011), p. 6.
Joanna Wood, Trerice, (National Trust, 2007), p. 22, 23.
Trerice: Cornwall, (National Trust, 1982), p. 4, 5.
Tobias Jellinek, Early British Chairs and Seats, (Antique Collectors Club, 2009), p. 12, pp. 116-123.
Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: the British tradition, (Antique Collectors Club, 1979), p. 220, 224, 232, 233.
Christopher Dresser Chronology
1834 Dresser is born July 4 in Glasgow.
1847 He enters the Government School of Design, London, where he said he was “an earnest student of Oriental art.”
1853 His first fabric design—Ladies’ Smock for Liddiard & Co.—is manufactured and registered.
1854 He marries Thirza Perry, with whom he will eventually have thirteen children.
1855 He is appointed botany lecturer at the Government School of Design, where he lectures on botany and art botany until 1869.
1857–58 He writes a series of eleven articles for Art Journal called “Botany as Adapted to the Arts and Art Manufacturers.”
1858 He designs his first carpet for Jackson & Graham and his first wallpaper for Wm. Woollams.
1859 Jena University confers a standard doctorate on Dresser.
1861 He first publishes “Art of Decorative Design” as an article in The Building News.
1862 He publishes The Art of Decorative Design as well as Development of Ornamental Art in the International Exhibition, an analysis of design at the World’s Fair held in London that year. Dresser is designing for Minton.
1863 He lectures on Japan at the Architectural Association. He assists Owen Jones on the decoration (in situ) of the Oriental Courts at South Kensington.
1867 He creates designs for Wedgwood, cast iron for Coalbrookdale, and carpets for Brinton & Lewis. All are exhibited at the Paris Exposition of that year.
1869 He designs 158 silk damasks for Wards, Halifax, and 67 carpets for Brintons, Kidderminster.
1870 He designs the total interior decoration for Allangate, Halifax, including ceilings, stained glass, and almost all of the furniture. His Principles of Decorative Art [Design] begins as a series of articles in the Technical Educator.
1872 He begins designing for Benham & Froud.
1873 He publishes Principles of Decorative Design in book form, addressing it to workingmen.
1874 He designs Bushloe House, Leicester, for his solicitor, Hiram B. Owston.
1876 He publishes Studies in Design.
1876–77 He travels to the United States, where he visits the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, retailers in Chicago, and San Francisco. He spends three months traveling and studying in Japan.
1877 He presents a collection of British Art-manufactures to Japan as the official representative of the South Kensington Museum, and he is appointed Official Advisor to the Japanese Government on Trade with Europe. One of at least two of his designs for cruets is posted to Hukin & Heath. He also applies for wallpaper design patents in the United States.
1879 Dixon & Sons first enters his metalwork in its workbooks. Linthorpe Art Pottery begins production. The Dresser and Holme Japanese art importer showroom opens.
1880 The Art Furnishers Alliance forms with Dresser as Art Superintendent. He is appointed editor of The Furniture Gazette.
1880–86 He designs for Old Hall Pottery.
1881 This is the only year for which some sketches of designs in his account books survive.
1882 He publishes Japan, Its Architecture, Art, and Art Manufactures, a detailed account of his remarkable visit of 1876–77.
1883 His Perry & Co. Kordofan candlestick design is registered. The Art Furnishers Alliance closes (possibly at the completion of Dresser’s contract) with very respectable sales figures of more than £25,000 over two years. Liberty & Co. expands and adopts a similar approach and range of goods.
1885 Annotated Dresser designs appear in the Elkington archive for the first time, though he may have worked for the firm since the early 1860s.
1886 He publishes Modern Ornamentation.
1888 The Clutha glass trademark is registered by James Couper & Sons.
1890 Ault Pottery produces Dresser’s designs from molds bought from the Linthorpe Art Pottery disposal sale.
1893 He signs a three-year contract with Ault.
1898 The Studio magazine describes him as “a pioneer” in several fields.
1904 He dies in his sleep while on a business trip to Mulhouse, France.
Introduction to Christopher Dresser Copper, Brass, and Painted Metalware, c.1880-1885
Christopher Dresser was a designer for Benham & Froud Ltd, a London based maker of copper and brass metalwares. He designed for the firm from about 1872 to 1893.
Dresser’s name was not used on Benham & Froud pieces.
Five of the seven copper and brass objects illustrated in this section bear Benham & Froud’s trademark, a cross and orb device.
Three of these five pieces, as well as the fire tools (no. 38), are attributed to Christopher Dresser based on early published material and stylistic evidence.
The Kordofan candlestick (no. 42) illustrated in this section bears the trademark of Richard Perry, Son & Co., Wolverhampton, West Midlands. It is stamped “Dr. Dressers’ Design,” with a registration mark for 1883, and is marked “Liberty & Co.,London,” indicating that it was retailed through Liberty & Co.
Introduction to Christopher Dresser Electroplated Nickel Silver and Silver Metalware, c.1878-1885
Hukin & Heath, Birmingham and London. There are four pieces with the marks of Hukin & Heath illustrated in this section, three of which are electroplated nickel silver and one of which is silver. The three electroplated pieces are marked “Designed by Dr. C. Dresser.”
Christopher Dresser was employed in 1879 by James Dixon & Sons, Sheffield, and his first design for that firm was registered in 1880. He sold about thirty-seven designs to Dixon between 1879 and 1882. All four Dixon pieces in this section have Dixon marks and Dresser’s facsimile signature.
Both of the electroplated jugs at the end of this section bear the mark of Elkington & Co., Birmingham and are illustrated in the Elkington pattern books c.1885.
Introduction to Christopher Dresser Glass, C.1885-1895
Dresser’s glass designs were marketed with the name “Clutha,” a trademark registered by James Couper & Sons, Glasgow.
One piece (no. 19) illustrated in this section bears the mark “Clutha, JC&S, Registered” and was probably retailed through Liberty & Co.
Another piece (no. 16) is faintly etched “Clutha Reg., Trademark.”
Eight of the pieces are marked “Clutha, Designed by C.D. Registered” and are etched with a lotus flower, the trademark of Liberty & Co. These marks appear in three sizes, but the size of the mark does not necessarily coincide with the size of the vessel. For example, a large vessel may have a small
mark, while a small vessel has a large mark.
One piece (no. 20) is unmarked. It was probably manufactured by Couper and retailed through Liberty & Co.
All etched glass marks are located on the bottom of the pieces.
Introduction to Christopher Dresser Ceramics c.1880-1893
Christopher Dresser was a cofounder (1879) and the art director (1879–82) of the Linthorpe Art Pottery in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire. There are ten Linthorpe pieces included in this section, all of which bear the Linthorpe mark. Nine of these are also marked with Dresser’s facsimile signature. The manager of Linthorpe from 1879 to 1882 was Henry Tooth (1842–1918); his initials appear on all ten of the pieces.
Ceramic designs by Dresser were also produced by Ault Pottery in Swadlingcote, South Derbyshire, founded by William Ault in 1887. In 1890 Ault purchased the Linthorpe molds for Dresser’s designs, and in 1893 Dresser signed a contract to produce new designs for Ault. The last three pieces illustrated in this section were manufactured by Ault and impressed with Dresser’s facsimile signature.
All of the ceramics illustrated are marked on
the bottom of the pieces.
18 ‘Carved Wallnuttree Chairs’
By Jenny Saunt
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Chair #39
This chair is one of a pair, from an original set of 18, Made in 1735 by William Hallett for the 6th Viscount Lord Irwin, whose portrait is below.
The chairs were originally made for Irwin’s London residence, but they were moved to his ancestral home, Temple Newsam, just a year later when Lord Irwin died. The connection between the original bills for Hallett’s work and the upholstery of these chairs was made by the late Christopher Gilbert, and the survival of the documents makes these chairs the earliest recorded example of William Hallett’s work.
William Hallett was a self-made man who hailed from Somerset. He married well enough to build himself a country house in about 1750, on the site of Cannons, the former Middlesex seat of the first Duke of Chandos.
In the early 1750s Hallett commissioned a portrait of himself (holding a plan of his house) and his family, to be painted by Francis Hayman (RA 1708-1776).
This painting signals Hallett’s success at gentrifying himself, and may be the only eighteenth-century portrait of a cabinet-maker which can be identified with absolute certainty.
Hallett lived until 1781 but retired from furniture making in the mid 1750s. His grandson, also called William Hallett (b.1764 and raised by his grandfather), continued to live in comfortable prosperity and he commissioned Gainsborough to paint a portrait of himself and his future wife Elizabeth in ‘The Morning Walk’, see below.
The bills for the set of 18 chairs and all their upholstery are in the Temple Newsam papers, which are held in Leeds City Archive.
The first line of this bill details the ’18 Walnuttree chairs’,
and it is signed at the bottom by William Hallett.
A further bill details the upholstery of the chairs, see below:
This upholstery bill was transcribed by Christopher Gilbert as follows:
‘for girtwebb, Sacking and Canvas used for 18 chairs and two Settee’s and tow make the Rowels
For 95 Pd. of Curled hair for the Do. Chairs and Settee’s
For 40yds of Red linnen to cover the Chairs under the Damaske
For 13 yds of Crimson In grain Harrateen for the Back of the Chairs and Settees
For Making of 18 Chairs, covered with Damask with a Cord Soed Round, and Bound with lace
For making to Sette’s Ditto
For 19 Yds. Crimson Sarsnitt to make Scarves to the Backs of the Settee’s and Chairs
For making and fitting on Do.
For 62 Yds. of Crimson in grain Serge to make Cases to the Chairs and Settee’s
For making of Cases to 18 chairs
For Making Cases to two large Settee’s
For Soeing. Silk thread. Tape, nails, and Cord Us’d for the Chairs, Settee’s, & 8 pr. of window Curtains
One of the ’18 walnutree chairs’ of this set, which is still at Temple Newsam, has been re-upholstered according to the instructions of the upholstery bill.
By making reference to other surviving examples of this chair type, the bill has been interpreted into upholstery, which is shown on the Temple Newsam chair below.
A binding of ribbon lace runs around the base of the seat and up over its corners.
‘Scarves’ of ‘Crimson Sarsnitt’ are sown into the upholstery and can either hang loose down the back of the chair or be thrown over the front to protect the cover from dirt, grease, or overly liberal applications of hair/wig powder.
References:
Connoisseur, December 1964 p. 224-225
Adam Bowett, ,Early Georgian Furniture 1715-1740, (Antique Collectors Club, 1988), p. 176.
Lucy Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 2 Vols, (Yale university Press, Newhaven and London in association with National Museums Liverpool, 2008), p. 26, 27.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Banister-Back Chairs c.1720-1750
‘Banister-back’ was a name given by British chair-makers to chairs with a solid central splat, usually shaped to the profile of a classical baluster or banister. This innocuous-sounding name belies the revolutionary nature of the design, which transformed British and European chair-making from about 1715 onwards. The name ‘banister-back’ derived from a traditional type of Chinese chair that had a vertical back splat linking the crest and seat rails; the splat was often ergonomically curved for greater comfort. Since the 1660s fashionable European chairs had been made with a gap between back and seat, so the idea of closing the gap and joining the crest and seat rails was entirely novel. The Chinese origin of the design was explicit in the name given to the earliest British chairs of this type, which were called India-back or, simply, Indian chairs (the word ‘India’ was at this time a generic British term for the Far East). By the 1720s, however, such chairs (21–26, & 27) were more commonly called banister-backs as the shape of the splat developed away from the Chinese original towards a more classical profile.
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Chair #21
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Chair #26
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Chair #27
The adoption of the banister-back coincided with the introduction of another new design – the cabriole leg. The term ‘cabriole’, describing the reverse-curved leg found on all the chairs in this section, is an anachronism and was not applied to this style of leg before the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century this leg was known as a claw or French leg. As the latter name suggests, it was a French design, developed around 1700 and adopted in Britain by about 1715. It remained the most popular design of legs for fashionable chairs for half a century.
The combination of the banister-back with the French leg was a stroke of unconscious genius, resulting in one of the most successful chair designs of all time. It seemed perfectly to express William Hogarth’s notion of the ‘line of beauty’; it was elegant, balanced, ergonomically sound, and capable of being adapted to almost any type of chair. In its simplest form the cabriole leg was a smoothly rounded curve with a round or oval pad for the foot, but it also lent itself to zoomorphic forms, the upper curve forming a ‘knee’ and the foot being variously modelled as a hoof, paw, or claw. In this guise the cabriole could be adapted to the classical iconography of the Palladian revival; the lion’s paw and mask were emblematic of Apollo and Bacchus, while the eagle’s claw and head represented Jupiter. The scallop shell commonly found on knees and chair backs was the symbol of Juno, goddess of love (22, 23, 24,25).
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Chair #22
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Chair #23
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Chair #24
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Chair #25
The banister-back chair dominated British chair design between 1720 and 1750, butby the 1740s new designs began to emerge; the fan-back (28) is but one example of an increasingly diverse range of styles that developed in the mid-eighteenth century to rival and eventually supercede it.
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Chair #28
Adam Bowett, Introduction to John Makepeace Chairs c.1990
John Makepeace (b.1939) is often hailed as the father of modern British furniture design, and he is credited with almost single-handedly reviving the art and craft of fine furnituremaking in late twentieth-century Britain.
Makepeace first became interested in furniture when he was a boy, and as a teenager he decided to train as a furniture-maker and designer. His early commercial work in the 1960s was sold by Heal’s, Liberty and Harrods, but in the mid-1970s he decided to scale down and concentrate on developing furniture-making into high art, combining peerless craftsmanship with eloquent and original design. In an interview in 2010, he explained ‘My passion is to create masterpieces that enrich people’s lives and the language of furniture’.
In 1976, Makepeace bought Parnham House in Dorset to establish a teaching college alongside his own workshop. Parnham College has since produced hundreds of talented furniture designers and makers. In 1983, Makepeace bought 350 acres of woodland at nearby Hooke Park, where he pursued his interest in the cultivation and use of indigenous timber.
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John Makepeace Chair #97
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John Makepeace Chair #98
Makepeace sold Parnham House in 2001; he continues to design and work from his new home, Farrs, in Beaminster Dorset. Today, Hooke Park operates as the Dorset campus of The Architectural Association School of Architecture.
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John Makepeace Chair #99
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John Makepeace Chair #100
Makepeace’s work explores both the aesthetic and the technical boundaries of furniture-making. Natural forms and shapes predominate but belie an often highly sophisticated technical specification. He makes ambitious use of lamination and mixes materials – wood, leather and metal – freely, while always allowing wood to have the primacy of expression. While the development of some forms, such as tables and chairs, is restrained to some degree by functional necessity (indeed, to combine originality with functionality is a primary challenge for any furniture designer), other designs, such as his cabinets, are more abstract. Each design is specific to its context, whether for a private house or a public gallery, and Makepeace insists on a free hand in interpreting the commission.
The chairs shown here are typical of Makepeace’s style: original, individual and flawlessly executed.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Arts & Crafts Chairs, c.1885-1905, Towards Modernism
Mackay Hugh (M.H.) Baillie Scott (1865–1945) was one of the first British designers to move away from the more vernacular tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement towards the more modernist tradition embraced by the term ‘Art Nouveau’ or ‘Jugendtstil’. In 1897 he was commissioned, together with Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942), to provide decoration and furniture for the Grand Duke of Hesse’s (1868–1937) palace in Darmstadt, Germany. This commission established Baillie Scott’s reputation in Continental Europe, a reputation that was cemented when he won first prize in a competition to design a ‘House for an Art Lover’ for the magazine Zeitschrift für Innen-Dekoration. A number of further German commissions followed, resulting in some avante-garde furniture designs such as those produced for the Werkstätten Exhibition, Dresden, in 1903 (86).
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Chair #86
In a similar vein, Arthur Heygate (A.H.) Mackmurdo (1851–1942) began as an Arts and Crafts designer before developing an increasingly eclectic and original style that prefigured European Art Nouveau (88–90). In 1882 he set up the Century Guild, an early return to the guild tradition, which was a feature of the late nineteenth-century progressive design scene. The guild’s aim was ‘to render all branches of Art the sphere, no longer of the tradesman, but of the artist’. Mackmurdo’s work was highly influential, and he counted C.F.A. Voysey (1857-1941) among his admirers. Many modern commentators consider him the father of English Art Nouveau.
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Chair #88
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Chair #89
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Chair #90
George Henry Walton (1867–1933) was a self-taught decorator initially based in Glasgow. In 1896 he was commissioned by Catherine Cranston (1849–1934) to refurbish her tea rooms in Buchanan Street, Glasgow. After moving to London in 1898, Walton set up his own workshops to design and produce furniture. He also designed for other commercial manufacturers, notably William Birch Ltd. of High Wycombe (91). Another Scottish designer, Ernest Archibald (E.A.) Taylor (1874–1951), worked for the prominent Glasgow furniture-makers Wylie & Lochhead (1883–1957). This firm led the way in popularising the Glasgow Style (93).
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Chair #91
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Chair #93
Among the English designers often linked to the Glasgow Style was George Montague Ellwood (1875–1955), whose most popular designs were produced by the London firm of J.S. Henry Ltd. (94). Another English designer was Edward Gordon (E.G.) Punnett (1862–1948), who lived and worked in High Wycombe for William Birch Ltd., a furnituremaker (92); his furniture designs also often employed English Art Nouveau motifs.
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Chair #92
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Chair #94
The most famous name in this section is undoubtedly Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928), who followed Walton in designing and furnishing the Glasgow tea rooms of Catherine Cranston in the 1890s (95, 96).
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Chair #95
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Chair #96
His work, together with that of his colleagues working in the Glasgow Style, was first exhibited in England at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1896, but the reception was mixed. It was too modern for some, or too close to the Continental Art Nouveau. In Europe, however, Mackintosh was regarded as a visionary, feted in exhibitions in Vienna in 1900 and Turin in 1902. His work defies facile categorisation: it is partly vernacular, partly Art Nouveau, partly modernist and wholly original.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Arts & Crafts Chairs, c.1895-1905, CFA Voysey
By Adam Bowett
Charles Francis Annesley (C.F.A.) Voysey (1857–1941) trained as an architect in the office of J.P. Seddon (1827–1906) before setting up an independent practice in 1882. His work reveals a mixture of influences, but he acknowledged that his biggest debt was to A.W.N. Pugin (1812-1852). Voysey echoed J.D. Sedding (1838–1891) in being a great admirer of Pugin. In a lecture delivered in 1888, Sedding wrote: ‘We should have had no Morris, no Street, no Burges, no Webb, no Bodley, no Rossetti, no Burne-Jones, no Crane, but for Pugin’.
Voysey’s association with Pugin might seem surprising, for there is little that is overtly Gothic in Voysey’s work, but like Pugin he believed deeply in the spiritual value of good design. In The British Architect in 1910, Voysey is quoted as saying: ‘Cold vegetables are less harmful than ugly dish covers. One affects the body and the other affects the soul’. Voysey also followed Pugin in designing every detail of a commission himself, from buildings to
door handles.
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Chair #81
Voysey’s furniture has much in common with the spirit of contemporary Arts and Crafts design, but can also be seen as leading towards modernism. His design has a thoroughly uncluttered, modern look. Voysey wrote in The Journal of Decorative Art in 1895, ‘Simplicity in decoration is one of the most essential qualities without which no true richness is possible’. Simplicity, however, masked a very subtle approach, one of whose characteristics was the combination of straight and curved elements with gentle tapers and changes in section, features also found in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868– 1928) and Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851–1942), an early friend. Voysey’s combination of flat surfaces with sparing use of decorative detail was equally influential.
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Chair #82
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Chair #83
However, unlike Mackintosh, Voysey was very much concerned with the raw materials and craftsmanship of his furniture. The great majority of his furniture was made in oak, and most of his designs were executed by a handful of trusted furniture-makers. Apart from a select group of private houses, Voysey’s biggest commission was to design and furnish the offices of the Essex and Suffolk Equitable Insurance Company between 1906 and 1910.
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Chair #84
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Chair #85
Voysey’s rather remote personality meant that, unlike William Morris (1834-1896), for instance, he did not acquire a large band of followers and admirers. An exception was Arthur Simpson of Kendal (1857–1952), a urniture-maker to whom Voysey entrusted many of his commissions. However, Voysey had many admirers in Continental Europe; his wallpaper was admired by the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta (1861–1947). In the later twentieth century, Voysey’s work – in furniture, textiles, paper and metal – gained increasing recognition among collectors and in museums.
Voysey’s son, Charles Cowles Voysey (1889–1981), was also an architect and, through his later partnership with John Brandon-Jones (1908–1999), much of Voysey’s memory lived on and much of his archive was preserved to the benefit of recent scholarship.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Arts and Crafts Chairs, c.1885-1930, The Vernacular Tradition
By Adam Bowett
William Richard (W.R.) Lethaby (1857–1931) was a founding member of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1884, and in 1887 he and others founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society as a showcase for contemporary designers and makers. Lethaby’s work often had a strong vernacular flavour (71), like that of his friend Ernest Gimson (1864–1919), with whom he jointly founded Kenton & Co. in 1890. This fertile yet short-lived venture was dissolved in 1892, but Lethaby remained committed to the Arts and Crafts cause, becoming a director of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1896.
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Chair #71
For Charles Robert (C.R.) Ashbee (1863–1942), craftsmanship was both the guarantor of quality and essential to the dignity of the craftsman (72, 73). His strong social conscience led him to found the Guild of Handicraft in the East End of London in 1888. In 1902 the Guild moved out of London to the Cotswold town of Chipping Campden, but Ashbee’s rural idyll soon failed in the face of commercial reality. He returned to London, a disillusioned man, in 1907.
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Chair #72
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Chair #73
Gimson trained as an architect before joining Lethaby and other like-minded designers to set up Kenton & Co., a furniture workshop in which trained cabinet-makers produced furniture based on the architects’ designs. After Kenton & Co. was disbanded in 1892, Gimson left London for Gloucestershire to establish a partnership with the architect Ernest Barnsley (1863–1926). He eventually settled at Sapperton in 1902. Gimson, who had begun by making furniture himself, quickly reverted to designing, leaving the making to experienced furniture-makers.
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Chair #76
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Chair #78
Gimson was inspired by traditional furniture made by rural craftsmen; one of his most popular designs, the ladder-back chair (76), was based on the work of Philip Clissett (1817– 1913), a Herefordshire chair-maker. Another vernacular variant was the ball-turned chair, of which Gimson produced several designs derived from chairs made in the north-west of England (78). The lattice-back chair was a Gimson original (79), however, and has been much copied since. This deceptively simple design requires a high level of skill to execute successfully, and the combination of simplicity and sophistication is one of the most striking characteristics of Gimson’s work.
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Chair #79
Gimson’s legacy was extraordinary. He laid the foundations of the Cotswold School of furniture design, and his work influenced a new generation of successful British furniture designers, including Ambrose Heal (1872–1959) and Gordon Russell (1892–1980), whose workshops were first established at nearby Broadway, in Worcestershire (77).
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Chair #77
Mackay Hugh (M.H.) Baillie Scott (1865–1945) is often considered an Art Nouveau designer, but most of his work falls within the British Arts and Crafts tradition. He trained as an architect, establishing a practice on the Isle of Man in 1889. There he collaborated with Archibald Knox (1864–1933) in designing furnishings for a number of houses on the island.
Shortly after 1900 Baillie Scott left the Isle of Man and settled in Bedford to work for the Bedford furniture manufacturer J.P. White (1855–1917). White’s 1901 catalogue included about 120 pieces designed by Baillie Scott and made at White’s Pyghtle Works (75). The furniture was sold through Liberty’s and at White’s London showrooms in New Bond Street.
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Chair #75
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Chair #80
Richard Barry Parker (1867–1947) was a successful architect and designer with an extensive practice in the northwest of England. Whirriestone, a house in Rochdale, Lancashire, was one of his best-known private commissions (80).
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Aesthetic Movement Chairs, c.1870-1875
The high Victorian Aesthetic movement was a broadly based approach to art, literature and domestic design, and it championed the primacy of aesthetic values over and above any others. The movement rejected the Ruskinian notion that good art and design should tend towards moral improvement, and instead it espoused the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. Beauty, and only beauty, was the true purpose of art.
In the more pragmatic world of architecture and furniture design, the Aesthetic movement was manifested in the work of Art Furniture designers such as Christopher Dresser (1834–1904) and E.W. Godwin (1833–1886), who emerged from the second wave of the Gothic Revival. They shared the mould-breaking ethos of the Gothic Revival but eschewed the heavy, often excessively ecclesiastical look of Gothic style in favour of something lighter and more forward-looking. Both Dresser and Godwin were captivated by the elegant aesthetics of Japan, a hitherto closed country that only opened up to European trade in the 1860s.
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Chair #66
Godwin ultimately produced some of the most progressive furniture of the
Victorian age. Many of his designs became commercially available through associations with mainstream manufacturers, most notably William Watt (1834–1885) of the Art Furniture Warehouse (66).
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Chair #69
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Chair #70
In a similar fashion, in 1880 Dresser established the Art Furniture Alliance to design and produce furniture and other household furnishings. Among his backers was Arthur Lasenby Liberty (1843–1917), founder of the London store that still bears his name. Dresser’s interests extended far beyond furniture to include glass, metalware, textiles and graphic design. His work is among the most distinctive of any Victorian designer (69–70).
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Chair #67
Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905) is better known as an architect than as a furniture designer. His style was typically part Gothic, part Italian Renaissance and wholly Victorian, best exemplified by the Natural History Museum in London (1872–81), which confirmed his status as the most commercially successful British architect of his age. Like many of his contemporaries, however, Waterhouse also turned his hand to interiors and furnishings (67), and he proved adept at handling the quasi-Gothic, quasi-Japanese style that characterised Art Furniture in the 1870s and 1880s.
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Chair #68
The work of Henry William (H.W.) Batley (1846–1932) is not now as widely known as that of Godwin and Dresser, but he was an important figure in the Art Furniture movement of the 1870s and 1880s (68). He trained under Bruce Talbert (1838–1881), one of the key figures of the ‘second wave’ of Gothic revivalists in the 1860s. His style, which blended Talbert’s Gothic and Godwin’s Japanese, had great commercial appeal. Batley’s chair (68), exhibited at the American World’s Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, had an influence on the prominent American furnishing firm Herter Bros. (1864–1906) and the American Aesthetic movement. As well as furniture, Batley designed wallpapers and textiles and was a talented engraver and printmaker.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Morris & Co. Chairs, c.1860-1890
The firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was founded in April 1861 and soon became more generally known as Morris & Co. (1875–1940). As well as William Morris (1834–1896) himself, its founding members included the architect Philip Speakman Webb (1831–1915) and the Pre-Raphaelite artists Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–1898). This remarkable array of talent aimed to revolutionise the design, decoration and furnishing of British houses. These artists were fired not only by a powerful disillusionment with mainstream Victorian design, but also by a fervent belief in the value of traditional craft skills and materials. Morris himself went further still, maintaining that a revolution in art and design would lead ultimately to ‘the bettering of all mankind’. Belief in political and social change was frequently an element that informed later nineteenth-century British design.
Morris & Co.’s designers looked both backward and forward. They desired change, but the direction of that change was to be determined by taking what was best from the past and applying it in the present. In terms of furniture design, this meant an emphasis on simplicity of form, truth to materials, fitness of purpose, and absence of sham. For example, the firm rejected the use of veneers until after 1890.
In an 1880 lecture, the firm’s philosophy was summed up in Morris’s exhortation to ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. It also entailed an element of romantic medievalism that, to its critics, was mawkish and sentimental.
The firm’s first major public exhibition, at the Mediaeval Court of the International Exhibition of 1862, was not an unqualified success. Some critics regarded its furniture as crude and backward looking – in fact, the Building News in August of that year thought it was fit only ‘to furnish a barn’. Moreover, it was not cheap, and consequently the firm’s clients were not the working men and women whose virtues Morris extolled, but rich lawyers, bankers and industrialists.
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Chair #61
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Chair #62
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Chair #63
The most successful Morris & Co. designs, in terms of the numbers made and their broad public acceptance, were the chairs designed after vernacular prototypes (61–63). They were variations on a theme – comprising a light turned or hand-drawn frame, usually ebonised (painted or japanned), with a rush seat – and these continued in production well into the twentieth century.
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Chair #64
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Chair #65
The adjustable armchair (64) designed by Phillip Webb, but based on a found
prototype, hinted at earlier styles. This armchair, often called a Morris chair, was to become an inspiration to a whole range of designers, including Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) and Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), a leading figure of the American Arts and Crafts movement.
From 1885 many Morris & Co. products were designed by George Washington Henry Jack (1855–1931) (65). Jack trained as an architect in Scotland before moving to London, where in 1880 he joined the office of Webb. It was Webb who introduced Jack to Morris. Jack soon became a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement as a member of the Art Workers’ Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. He also taught at the Royal
College of Art. He continued to work as an architect and designer up to and after the First World War (1914–18).
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Gothic Revival Chairs, c.1840-1880
The Gothic Revival was the most powerful British artistic, architectural, and cultural movement of the Victorian age. In the early part of the period its chief protagonist was Augustus Welby Northmore (A.W.N.) Pugin (1812–1852). For Pugin the Gothic or Christian style embodied an era that was artistically and morally superior to the ‘pagan’ classicism that had prevailed in Europe since the Renaissance. In Contrasts, his seminal work on Gothic architecture published in 1836, Pugin argued for ‘a return to the faith and social structures of the Middle Ages’. But he was no slavish imitator of medievalism, and many of his furniture designs have a directness and simplicity that, while Gothic in spirit, is virtually timeless (55).
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Chair #55
It was Pugin who developed the concept of ‘revealed construction’, by which the structure of an object was directly expressed in its design. Revealed construction became one of the key dogmas of the later nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement.
In his book True Principles (1841) Pugin stated: ‘The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building’.
Pugin’s son, Edward Welby (E.W.) Pugin (1834–1875), took over his father’s practice and continued his work in a similar style. He adhered to his father’s philosophy of revealed construction and yet managed to create new forms that were both Gothic and modern simultaneously (58).
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Chair #58
A.W.N. Pugin had many admirers, and the second generation of Gothic revivalists included several highly original talents. George Edmund (G.E.) Street (1824–1881) spent all his life working in the Gothic style, initially as an ‘improver’ of existing buildings and later as a creator of new ones. The building of the new Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, London, is his best-known and most prestigious commission (59).
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Chair #59
Another talented architect-designer was the idiosyncratic William Burges (1827–1881), who inherited sufficient wealth to spend the first half of his life travelling and studying medieval art. His career as a professional architect began in the offices of Edward Blore (1787–1879) in 1844, but by 1856 he had established his own practice. His version of Gothic combined medieval French with Moorish and other influences, expressed in robust forms and strong colour (60).
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Chair #60
E.W. Godwin (1833–1886), a friend of Burges, began his career as an architect in the Italianate Gothic style, but he was also powerfully impressed by the art of Japan, which was just beginning to be known in Europe in the 1860s. His early work, such as the Northampton Guildhall (56), was robustly conceived in the Gothic manner, but he quickly moved on to a lighter, Japanese-influenced style in the 1870s and 1880s.
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Chair #56
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Chair #57
In the 1860s the Gothic style was rapidly adopted by provincial furniture-makers in all parts of Britain (57). The Gothic Revival furniture, both in its muscular form as well as in a lighter vein, was manufactured by firms throughout the north of England all during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. These firms often made use of the same designers
and drew from the same design sources.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Historicist Chairs c.1820-1900
One of the most evident elements of nineteenth-century furniture design was a conscious evocation of the past. In the eighteenth century, antiquarianism was an intellectual novelty espoused by romantics and eccentrics such as Horace Walpole (1717–1797). His legacy in the next generation included the fabulously wealthy William Beckford (1760–1844) and the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). However, as the nineteenth century progressed, interest in the medieval and more recent past became a more mainstream pursuit. This self-conscious antiquarianism encompassed not only a fascination with pre-Reformation Gothic, but also a romantic fascination with Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolean and, even, the William and Mary or Anglo-Dutch styles. Furniture made for this market included faithful copies, imaginative pastiches and deliberate fakes.
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Chair #50
One vein of this historicism was the veneration of objects associated with great
national heroes or national events, and this is embodied in the chair made from the famous Waterloo elm in the form of a Roman sella curuli (50). This was a type of seat used by Roman high officials, so it was an appropriate model for a chair commemorating a great British hero, the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852). Similar mementoes, ranging in size from the merest trinkets to full-size furniture, were made in memory of Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758–1805), killed in the hour of his greatest triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805).
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Chair #52
The monkish Glastonbury chair, based on a late medieval original said to have come from Glastonbury Abbey, was probably the most copied Gothic chair of the nineteenth century (52). Many examples, like the one shown here, were more or less faithful copies of the original, which became widely known after the publication of an engraving by Henry Shaw (1800–1873) in 1836. Other direct copies of old chairs, but perhaps somewhat different in their intent, are featured in this section. One of these (54) is a copy of a common model of eighteenth-century dressing chair, which by the nineteenth century had become used as a writing chair. The firm of Gillow & Co. made several variants of this design from the 1820s onwards in walnut, yew and rosewood. Another (53) is an English copy of an early eighteenth-century Dutch chair. This design survives in a variety of different versions, all inspired by the Dutch originals. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) Europe was awash with the looted contents of aristocratic houses, royal palaces and ransacked monasteries, and these spoils found a ready market amongst British collectors. In correspondence, British furniture makers exploited this appetite, both with variations on a theme and exact reproductions of the original Dutch models.
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Chair #53
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Chair #54
Among the foremost promoters of historicist design was the architect Edward Blore (1787–1879). He specialised in the restoration of historic buildings and in designing new buildings in an historic style. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Blore was not purely a Gothic revivalist. A chair was designed by Blore as part of the re-building and refurnishing of Lambeth Palace (the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury) from 1828 onwards (51). The design combines elements of English backstools of the late seventeenth century with hints of The Netherlands from the seventeenth century and of Walpole’s Elizabethan chairs at Strawberry Hill, and yet the result is purely nineteenth-century British.
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Chair #51
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Windsor Chairs, c.1760-1820
A Windsor chair is defined by its construction. The seat, usually a single thick board, forms the primary structural member, into which everything else – legs, arm supports and back–is fixed. It is an ancient method of seat construction, but only in Britain and its North American colonies did it achieve recognition as a fashionable and at times sophisticated form of seating. This selection of Windsors includes a full range of examples, from the most ‘primitive’ to the most sophisticated.
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Chair #44
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Chair #45
The earliest Windsor chairs were made for outside use – in parks, gardens and loggias – and were called Forest chairs for that reason (from the Latin word foris, which means ‘outdoors’). The best examples were first made in the Thames valley and shipped to London from the town of Windsor, which is how they acquired their name (44, 45). They were usually painted green, which was the standard finish for eighteenth-century Forest chairs. The materials varied: seats were almost invariably made of elm because of its resistance to splitting; other parts were beech, ash, cherry, yew and, even, walnut. The best Windsors were made entirely of yew, except for the elm seat, because this wood combined flexibility with great strength and durability. Windsor chairs were also used indoors, typically in the halls, galleries and, even, libraries of some aristocratic houses. By the late eighteenth century they had migrated down the social scale and could be found in meeting rooms, coffee houses and inns. The most sophisticated variant was the Gothic Windsor (49), while the Prince of Wales feathers chair (47) was among the most popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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Chair #47
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Chair #49
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the centre of Windsor chair production moved away from the Thames valley to High Wycombe. The reason for this change is not fully understood, but it coincided with a period of high agricultural unemployment, which meant that there was a large pool of redundant labour for Wycombe chair-makers upon which to draw. This, combined with the ready availability of timber in the surrounding woodland and easy access to the London market, allowed the Wycombe chair-makers to develop a new type of chair manufacture based on the mass production of components – including legs, stretchers and seats – by semi-skilled workers. Within a few decades, regional variations of the Wycombe system were developed all over Britain to satisfy the demands of an ever-growing and mainly urban population.
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Chair #46
Alongside the development of the commercial Windsor chair was an entirely
independent and much older tradition of Windsor-type chairs, whose design and production had probably not changed in hundreds of years (46). These ‘primitive’ Windsors were made by unskilled or semi-skilled rural craftsmen in many parts of Britain, using simple tools and a minimum of working and shaping. These were the seats of farmers, husbandmen and the rural poor, and their survival is a testament to the fundamental strength of the design.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Upholstered Chairs, c.1715-1745
The increasing prosperity of eighteenth-century Britain was reflected in the houses and furnishings of its people. What were once rarities became commonplace, and former luxuries became widely available. Woollen cloth, Britain’s staple manufacture and once the universal choice for clothing, bedding, curtains and upholstery, increasingly gave way to imported cottons, silk and velvets. However, unlike chair frames, which are robust and can be repeatedly repaired, cloth is fragile and rarely survives intact. Consequently, only one of the chairs in this section (43), and possibly one other, retains its original upholstery. The broad back and seat give maximum exposure to the colourful tapestry, which is set off with carved and gilded woodwork.
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Chair #43
Most of the other chairs do, nevertheless, have genuine eighteenth-century needlework covers, and this is a testament to the popularity of this type of fabric. It was colourful, was relatively hardwearing, and could easily be repaired; every Georgian girl was taught needlework from an early age, and this might well account for its high survival rate. Even when past repair for daily use, it was often preserved for its decorative value.
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Chair #38
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Chair #39
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Chair #42
All the chairs in this section have particular roles – none are dining chairs. Three are back-chairs (38, 39, 42), eighteenth-century versions of the backstool, and originally belonged to larger sets that might well have included armchairs and sofas. Such chairs were found in drawing rooms, best parlours and bedchambers. Two are easy chairs (40, 41), which we now commonly call wing chairs. This type of chair was developed at the end of the seventeenth century and was originally used in bedchambers and dressing rooms. Some were made to be adjustable so that the occupant might doze or sleep without actually going to bed (41). By the end of the eighteenth century such chairs had begun to migrate into parlours and drawing rooms as well.
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Chair #40
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Chair #41
Two are plain armchairs (33, 34) and could have been used in almost any room in the house; there could well have been matching back-chairs as well.
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Chair #33
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Chair #34
Two others are dressing chairs, with low backs to allow the sitter’s hair to be powdered and dressed (35, 36). In the nineteenth century such chairs became redundant, their purpose forgotten, and they became known to connoisseurs and collectors as writing chairs.
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Chair #35
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Chair #36
One chair (37) is a purpose-made writing chair with a folding desk at the back and candle slides and a pen drawer housed in the arms. The writer would sit reversed with his arms on the back, the desk in front of him, and candle and pen to each side.
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Chair #37
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Chair #43
The frames of these chairs were designed primarily as vehicles to display upholstery, so decoration is largely confined to carved details on the legs and arms. Claw feet, shell knees and masks reveal neo-Palladian influence, while the scrolling, leafy decoration of one of the chairs in this section (43) heralds the arrival of the rococo.
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Giles Grendey Chairs, c.1735-1745
Giles Grendey (1693–1780) was one of London’s best documented furniture-makers. He was born in Gloucestershire and at the age of sixteen was apprenticed to a prominent London joiner and
furniture-maker, William Sherborne. He became free of the Joiners’ Company in 1716. By 1726 he had established his own business and had taken his first apprentices. In 1729 he was elected to the Livery of the Joiners’ Company, to which he remained closely connected all his working life.
By 1731, if not before, Grendey had established a workshop and warehouse in St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell, and these remained his working premises until at least 1755. His dwelling house was nearby, at No 2 Lyon Street. Grendey remained active into the 1760s, becoming Master of the Joiners’ Company in 1766, but probably retiring shortly thereafter. In the 1770s, Grendey – now styled ‘gentleman’ – bought a country house at Palmer’s Green, a village a few miles outside London, complete with a coach house, stable and grounds. He died in March 1780, at the age of eighty-seven.
Grendey’s was a large business. When fire destroyed his premises in 1731 he was said by the London Daily Post, to have lost furniture to the value of £1,000 ‘pack’d for Exportation’, in addition to an easy chair worth 500 guineas. In August 1740, The London Evening Post described him as ‘a great Dealer in the Cabinet way’. Grendey was an importer and dealer in timber and had business dealings with some of London’s most eminent cabinet-makers, among them George III’s cabinet-maker, John Cobb (1710–1778), who married Grendey’s daughter, Sukey, in 1755. Grendey’s clients included several notable eighteenth-century figures, such as Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838) of Barn Elms and
Lord Scarsdale (1726 –1804) of Kedleston in Derbyshire.
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Chair #29
We know little of Grendey’s personality, but he was undoubtedly a sharp businessman and a difficult man when crossed. In 1726 one of his apprentices petitioned for a discharge from Grendey’s service on the grounds that he had been beaten. In court records the petitioner stated that Grendey ‘beat the pet[itioner] in a very barbarous manner, sometimes with a great stick and at other times knocking him downe and then kicking him in the face and other parts and in stead of learning him his trade as a Joyner sett him to sawing large timber which noe ways relates to the trade and hath likewise often threatened to be the death of the s[ai]d pet[itioner]’.
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Chair #30
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Chair #31
Grendey’s furniture is chiefly known not by documented commissions but by the large number of labelled pieces, mostly chairs, that survive (29). His workshop produced a number of different models, of which the veneered walnut and red japanned versions (30, 31) are the best known. Both were probably standard London models, of a type made by a number of different workshops, but Grendey’s are characterised not only by their labels but also by the presence of stamped initials on their frames. These are likely to be the workman’s initials and might indicate some form of subcontracting or piecework arrangement. Unlabelled chairs are often attributed to the Grendey workshop if these initials are present or if the chairs closely match labelled examples in construction and design (32).
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Chair #32
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Chairs c.1600-1740
The chairs in this section span about a century and illustrate a period of remarkable stylistic and material change. Some types of chairs, such as the upholstered backstool and its armed counterpart (8, 9), changed little during the course of the seventeenth century.
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Chair #8
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Chair #9
The simple, boxy form was economical to make and to upholster. Turkey-work and leather upholstery were particularly popular because of their modest cost and durability, and were commonly found in ‘middling’ and upper-class homes. Much leather was imported, especially from Russia, and Turkey-work was so called because of its resemblance to Oriental carpets. It was made in several parts of England, but particularly in Yorkshire, from whence it was carried to London for sale. Its popularity was accounted for by its modest price, bright colours, and durability.
Wooden backstools or chairs showed greater variation, revealing different styles existing in parallel. The Lancashire and Manchester backstools (10, 11) and the twist-turned chair (14) are probably contemporary in date, but in stylistic terms the first two look back to the 1630s, while the third embodies the new fashions of the 1660s.
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Chair #10
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Chair #11
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Chair #14
Even more radical were the cane chairs (12,13,16,17), which replaced traditional upholstery or panelled backs and seats with woven strips of cane imported from the Far East.
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Chair #12
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Chair #13
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Chair #16
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Chair #17
These chairs first emerged in London in the 1660s and by 1700 were probably the most common seating type found in middle- and upper-class English houses. Their rapid stylistic development means that they can be closely dated, as innovation followed innovation over a period of about fifty years, until, about 1710–15, they began to fall from favour.
Cane chairs aside, most new furnishing ideas came from France. The scrolled-leg or horsebone chair (7) was an English variant of the fashionable French os de mouton chair developed in Paris in the 1670s.
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Chair #7
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Chair #7 detail
By 1700 it had reached its ultimate development and was probably the most common design of upholstered chair found in high-status houses.
The pillar-leg or cross-frame chair (20), so called because of the shape of its legs and stretchers, respectively, was another French innovation that became popular in England in the 1690s and remained in fashion until the 1720s. Upholstery fabrics were available to suit most pockets, ranging from plain English woollens to colourful needlework, silk damask, and rich velvet.
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Chair #20
These stylistic changes occurred against a background of rapid economic growth created by burgeoning overseas trade, which created both a demand for luxury and the means to pay for it. The manufacture of upholstered furniture in silk, velvet, and wool, in greater quantities than ever before, is one manifestation of the new wealth. It is fair to say, however, that the survival rate of these more expensive fabrics has been greater than that of plain English woollens, so we have a somewhat skewed impression of everyday furnishings of this period.
Outside London the pace of change was much slower. Local materials and traditional forms persisted in rural and remote areas, often with only the slightest acknowledgement of metropolitan fashions (18, 19). This was often a question of choice rather than necessity, testifying to the importance of local values in rural societies.
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Chair #18
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Chair #19
Adam Bowett, Introduction to Panel-Back Chairs c. 1540-1680
Panel-back chairs are the most numerous type of early British chair to survive. Their survival owes much to solid construction—with pegged mortise and tenon joints—and durable materials (chiefly oak). This system of construction, employed by joiners throughout the British Isles, produced predominantly rectilinear forms that were nevertheless capable, through variations in proportion and differences in carved, turned, and inlaid ornament, of almost infinite variety.
In stylistic terms all these chairs, even the earliest, embody the Classical style of
architecture and design that arrived in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Chair legs and arm supports are conceived as columns and the frames are decorated with a broad repertoire of lunettes, guilloches, flowerheads, vines, and other foliage, all derived from the new decorative styles emanating from France and Italy. All the chairs in this section are armchairs and are were therefore created as highstatus objects for high-status people. Three (1, 2, 3) have decorated backs recording their original owners.
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Panel-Back Chair #1
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Panel- Back Chair #2
All were members of the provincial gentry; they were not aristocrats but
landowners and businessmen, men of standing in their communities and closely tied by
inheritance and marriage to their localities. Their chairs embody the solid virtues of family, land, and tradition that underpinned British society at this time. Only one, Sir John Arundell (1495–1561), was a national figure. He was a soldier who served Henry VIII in both war and peace, acquiring the soubriquet ‘Tilbury Jack’ while in command of the king’s navy. It is perhaps significant that his chair can be disassembled for travel, and perhaps even for shipboard use. Another owner, Sir Richard Wilbraham of Woodhey (1579–1643), became a victim of the Civil War between king and Parliament (1642–45). After trying unsuccessfully to prevent his hometown of Nantwich in Cheshire from being drawn into the conflict, he was arrested by Royalist forces and died in prison. One chair has iron staples to allow it to be carried, like a sedan chair (4).
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Panel-Back Chair #4
Perhaps its owner became infirm, or perhaps he attained some civic office that entitled him to be carried aloft on the shoulders of his supporters. A well-known engraving by the eighteenthcentury artist William Hogarth (1697–1764), Chairing the Member (1755), shows the newly elected Member of Parliament being carried in such a fashion.
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Panel-Back Chair #5
Chairs for well-born children (5) survive in surprising numbers, an indication, perhaps, of the sentimental value attached to such objects, as well as their appeal to modern collectors. The one shown here has the distinctive pyramid finials and profile-cut crest rail of chairs made in North Cheshire and South Lancashire.