• Review of the Year 2022
• Introduction
• Lorelei and Undine: The History, Context, and Migration of a Pair of 1871 Coalport Art Vases. Andrew Paul Wood
• Heraldic Glass at Abney Hall, Cheadle: A Journey. Gill Fitzpatrick
• Richard Lunn: A Pioneer Pottery Educator. Marshall Colman
• Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams Arbs: Decorative Artist and Monumental Sculptor. Phyllida Shaw
• Florence Rimmington and the Fawcett Jewel. Stephen Pudney
• A Pottery of ‘Soulfulness’: The Ceramic Art of William Moorcroft. Jonathan Mallinson
• Muriel Rose and Peggy Turnbull’s The Little Gallery: Elevating the Profile of Craft through Interwar Shop Displays. Lotte Crawford
• Otti Berger: A Bauhaus Pioneer and Innovator in the Textile Industry. Widar Halén
• Inspired By Nature: The Life and Work of Norah Creswick, Silversmith. Lianne Hackett
• Janice Tchalenko: More than a Potter – a Chemist and an Artist. Carol Cashmore
• List of Members of the DAS
This special edition of the Decorative Arts Society Journal was produced in association with the William Shipley Group for RSA History, an independent body which organised a conference in November 2012 on the International Exhibition of 1862.
Pelişor Castle is the only architectural ensemble in Romania whose Arts and Crafts, Secessionist and Neo-Romanian interiors survive almost intact, despite the tribulations of the communist period. Situated near Peleş Castle in Sinaia, around 140 km north of Bucharest, this royal residence occupies a distinct place among turn-of-the-century European palaces. Although its exterior echoes the Germanic style of other buildings on the Peleș royal estate, its interior offers an ‘artistic textbook’ of British-born Queen Marie’s original experiments in interior decoration and furniture design. Over the course of 30 years, from 1899–1929, Marie worked closely with the Czech architect Karel Liman and the Austrian furniture designer Bernhard Ludwig to create a series of remarkable rooms. They demonstrate the influence of British Arts and Crafts ideas, Art Nouveau and Secessionist design, the Neo-Byzantine style and (after the First World War) the Neo-Romanian style. The palace thus bears fascinating material witness to Marie’s changing ideas about the nature of her royal role.
Macrina Oproiu
In 1891, the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths founded a new educational institute at New Cross. In its first decade or so, the Art School at Goldsmiths was one of the most successful in the country, noted especially for the achievements of its women students in the annual National Competition of schools of art and design. As teacher of design at Goldsmiths, Amor Fenn was a key figure in this success story. Although little known today, he was a prolific and successful designer, particularly of architectural metalwork. An archive of material from his studio has recently become available, shedding new light on his work, career and professional connections. Further research has revealed more about Goldsmiths’ women students, including the work by Katherine Coggin and Hilda Pemberton, early designers of Cymric silver for Liberty & Co.
Stephen Pudney
This article traces the life and work of Amy Kotzé (1884–1976), a multiskilled artist and gallerist working across fashion, embroidery, ceramics, craft and design. Kotzé moved in influential circles at a pivotal moment in women’s history during the early 20th century but, like many women operating small, independent businesses that leave few material traces, she is little known. By reconstructing her personal and professional biography, I hope to place her back alongside some of her better-known contemporaries.
Rachel Conroy
Much of the avant-garde, European-influenced, modernist furniture designed and manufactured in Britain during the 1930s has been well documented and exhibited, with a focus invariably falling on two related enterprises: Jack Pritchard and Wells Coates’s Isokon company (which commenced manufacturing furniture in 1933) and Gerald Summers’s Makers of Simple Furniture (established 1931–32). However, this is only part of a more complex story as Bauhaus-influenced, rational design was not the only European avant-garde style to make its way across the English Channel. In 1931 The Betula Ltd., a small woodworking company was established in London, producing furniture influenced by the design ideas of the Austrian philosopher architect, occultist, and educational reformer Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). The expressionist furniture they manufactured exemplified ‘anthroposophical’ design, a term coined by Steiner from ‘anthropo’ (human) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom). This was an all-encompassing approach to design and architecture evolving from the wider spiritual movement founded by Steiner that is part philosophy, part mysticism, and is focused on an intellectual and creative pursuit of the spiritual world.
Tony Peart
In their book, From Palaces to Pre-Fabs: Pioneering British Woman Interior Decorators and Designers (2017), Ruth Artmonsky and Stella Harpley assert that many early women interior designers, ‘were decidedly amateur, relying on their self-confidence, energy, class confidence and social networks, rather than technical know-how and skills which became necessary to meet the requisite standards for membership’ of professional bodies like the British Institute of Interior Decorators, and the Design and Industries Association. Women were excluded from membership of the Institute until after World War I, and few if any women served on the governing committees of professional bodies. Women began to emerge onto the design scene in the 1920s. Some, such as Syrie Maugham and Dolly Mann, began interior decorating businesses, while others opened galleries in London selling ‘good taste’ in the form of crafts and selected mass-produced objects. The furniture designer and manufacturer Betty Joel opened her first workshop on Hayling Island in 1924. With the greater freedoms afforded them as an outcome of the War, women such as Marian Speyer gained the confidence to enter such male-dominated professions. This paper tells her story, taking into account her family background, her training, her business and the designs she produced, and the adverse effects of war on her career.
Duane Kahlhamer
Drawing on information and memories gathered from the unpublished memoir and recorded oral history of studio potter Ursula Mommens, this article will explore the earlier part of her extended career. Although women had long held roles in the production of industrial ceramics, Ursula Mommens was one of the first generation of women to receive formal training in the production of handmade pots and in successfully exhibiting them, helped to demonstrate that women were capable of mastering form, as well as colour and decoration. This article will situate her among some of the major proponents of studio pottery in Britain during the interwar period and contextualise her artistic practice in the light of differing factions and approaches to handmade ceramics. Most importantly, it will celebrate the work of this determined woman artist, who fashioned her own place in the ever-evolving arena of studio pottery in Britain.
Helen Ritchie
The architecture of Keble College, Oxford and its architect William Butterfield attracted great attention while the college was being built during the later 1860s and the 1870s. The choice of red brick was controversial enough for nineteenth-century Oxford, but it was the use of bold geometrical patterns in contrasting colours of cream and black brick combined with decorative elements in lighter coloured stone that especially concerned the critics. The appearance of chequerboard patterns, zig-zags, and wave-like patterns that ran across the facades of the college buildings enraged some observers, who viewed Butterfield’s polychromatic exteriors as provoking. This article investigates how Butterfield, who was no stranger to architectural polychromy, used distinctive coloured patterning in his designs for Keble College and suggests that he may have intentionally been referencing Tudor architecture.
Megan Aldrich
This paper seeks to unravel the identity of those responsible for the original stained glass and art metalwork at Manchester’s Victoria Baths, which has remained a mystery for decades. Based on my research over the last few years I suggest who the designer might be, although their identity remains contested. Attempting to resolve the riddle, the paper explores the exquisite mix of richly coloured and textured stained glass, leaded lights and ornamental art metalwork with reference to Manchester businesses active in the Arts and Crafts Movement in the city at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Mike Franks
Moquette has become an intrinsic part of the unique character of public transport in London since the beginning of the twentieth century. Moquette derives from the French word for fitted carpet. It is a tough woollen fabric that is used on public transport seating all over the world and has been extensively used in London on the Underground, trains, buses, trams, trolleybuses, and cable cars over the Thames. This article will explore the origins of the term moquette and how the fabric has been used throughout history. It will also describe the commissioning, design, and manufacturing process, as well as the work of artists commissioned by London Transport to produce pattern designs for moquette. London Transport Museum holds a collection of moquette designs used across the capital for a century. This important resource remains a source of inspiration and appreciation for future designs as the transport network expands.
Georgia Morley
The twentieth-century story of the Irish linen industry was one of spectacular fluctuation, but also terminal decline. It faced persistent threats including economic depressions, synthetic fibres, raw supply difficulties, foreign competition and in addition, a new political identity for Ulster. Shrinking markets no longer placed the same value on ideologically driven concepts of quality and the (Irish) provenance that were defining features of linen marketing prior to The Great War. However, there were pockets of resilience in the industry. The Old Bleach Linen Company exemplified this and is a case in point. In 1864, Charles J. Webb revived a dormant cotton mill, by the River Maine, in Randalstown, County Antrim. From the outset, the company produced high quality well-designed linens, supported by royal patronage and global markets. By the Interwar period, the company had expanded considerably by innovating in a number of areas. Colour-fast vat dyes for linen was one company development and is the focus of this article.
Catherine O’Hara
The aim of this article is to investigate more closely a particular aspect of the art of Fulco Di Verdura (1899–1978): the roots and durability of the ‘umbilical cord’ which connected him not only to Sicilian history but also to the rich history of Sicilian art and particularly its jewellery. His early sensory connections: sights, scents, tastes, sounds and above all colours, were impressed indelibly on his imaginative soul. He also salvaged patterns, materials and the techniques of goldsmiths’ work using enamels, coral, precious and semi-precious stones that were intrinsic to the history of jewellery in Sicily. He chose not to live on the island of his birth, but he also chose not to forget it.
Roberta Cruciata
Althea McNish (1924–2020) is regarded as the first black designer of Caribbean heritage to gain international recognition for her textile designs. Her work in the field of textiles and interior design is remarkable, both for its artistic achievement and its social and cultural significance for British post-war design. Although McNish would go on to have a career spanning nearly 60 years as a designer, there is very little written about her approach to practice and process and use of colour. This article will discuss and highlight McNish’s impact, influence and role in the development of the use of colour in mid twentieth-century textile design, through unpublished archival research and reflections on the recent exhibition of her work. McNish’s work is informed by her dynamic palette and her vibrant use of colour, for which she would become renowned, indeed McNish herself stated, ‘I was born seeing colour from the day of my birth.’
Rose Sinclair
Toots Zynsky, an innovative and leading figure in the American studio glass movement from its early days, has explored colour, in its infinite variety, in her vessel sculptures for nearly 40 years. Initially her work in glass was concerned more with the fascinating properties of the material than with colour. But over a three-year period from 1982 to 1985 many things came together. She solved various technical issues with her work which enabled her to make the thin coloured glass threads from which she creates her sculptures. She also completely changed her environment, living in Amsterdam, Venice and Ghana, which all provided critical colour influences, along with music and the natural world that still inspire her today.
Sarah Nichols
In 1871 Coalport manufactured a matched pair of exhibition vases for the London International Exhibition of that year. Beautifully painted with Germanic water nymphs, Coalport experts had thought them lost, when in fact they had been purchased for Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, where they have been on display for over a century.
Andrew Paul Wood
In 1886, George Faulkner Armitage (1849-1937) of Altrincham, Cheshire was commissioned to design several features of the specially erected exhibition buildings for the Manchester Royal Jubilee Exhibition to be held the following year to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. By its very nature, the exhibition was temporary with exhibits either being sold or returned to their owners after it closed. In the last few years, new information has been discovered about Armitage himself; this article provides a short overview of the man and his business. It also charts the remarkable survival of some heraldic glass windows, specifically designed for one of the reception rooms in the exhibition, through two moves to their permanent home at Abney Hall in Cheadle, Cheshire, now part of Greater Manchester and owned by Stockport Council.
Gill Fitzpatrick
Histories of British studio pottery are on nodding acquaintance with Richard Lunn (1840 – 1915), who set up the first comprehensive pottery course in a British art school, but little is known about him or his teaching methods. This article gives an account of his career in industry and education. He was an artist with a range of accomplishments, historicist and eclectic in his approach but with strong opinions about design and how it should be taught. His work forms part of the fabric of the Victoria & Albert Museum, on whose decoration he worked as a student. He was a businessman but his commercial instinct was poor. As a colleague he was sometimes difficult but was loved by his students. He put 40 years of experience into his courses and made an important contribution to the development of studio pottery in Britain.
Marshall Colman
In December 1928, aged 51, Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. She died in 1934, at the age of 56 and remained a little-known name until the publication, 80 years later, of Duncan Macmillan’s illustrated history of the Scottish National War Memorial. Macmillan described her as the memorial’s ‘star sculptor’ for the volume, variety and excellence of the work she contributed to the memorial. Her monumental sculpture is extraordinary for its realism, humanity and attention to detail and those same qualities can be found in the decorative work she made throughout her life and from which she earned most of her living until her mid-40s. This article takes a closer look at her decorative art and design, from her time as a student at City of Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art through to the end of her life.
Phyllida Shaw
The great political reformer and pioneer feminist, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, served as President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). At the 1913 Annual Council Meeting of the NUWSS, she was presented with a fine enamelled gold pendant set with pearls and fire opals, in recognition of her commitment to the cause. The location of the pendant was unknown for many years, until its rediscovery in 2018. It is now owned by the Fawcett Society and displayed in the Museum of London, but its designer and maker remained unknown until now. This article presents research revealing that the pendant was made by the relatively unknown artist, jeweller and silversmith, Florence Rimmington. Sadly, she did not live to see women’s suffrage achieved – she died of influenza in 1916, aged 37. The article surveys what is known of Rimmington’s career and begins the task of cataloguing her known work.
Stephen Pudney
Throughout the career of William Moorcroft, a `thoughtful’ or `soulful’ quality was identified in his pottery; it commanded attention, not simply because of its distinctive technique, but because it had something to say. Often noted in reviews, it was evoked too in private letters of appreciation which regularly spoke of the uplifting effect of his work, decorative and functional alike. For a French critic writing in 1939, this sensitivity underlay what he called the valeur morale of Moorcroft’s art; it was seen to have an enduring relevance, international in its reach. Such reactions were consistent with Moorcroft's view of his vocation as a potter, described in 1903 as the ambition to `express my own feeling in clay’. His stylistic vocabulary was clearly adapted to a radically (and often rapidly) changing world, but its underlying integrity, its `soul’, remained constant, and unmistakeably his.
Jonathan Mallinson
Muriel Rose and Peggy Turnbull’s The Little Gallery was a central site of craft-knowledge, exchange and support for artist-craftswomen and men between 1927 and 1939. This article aims to give greater visibility to the vibrant culture of this gallery, and to show how its directors played a unique role in facilitating the professionalisation of women artists of this period and the development of the modern applied arts in Britain.
Lotte Crawford
Otti Berger was at the forefront of the Bauhaus avantgarde and she was active as a student (from 1927 to 1930), a weaver, designer, innovator, teacher and, for a short time, head of the Bauhaus weaving workshop October 1931 to March 1932. Above all she helped pave the way for women designers and weavers to be accepted. In a time of revolutionary change for the textile industry, Berger focused on combining organic and synthetic fibres, virtually eliminating pattern in favour of structure and texture, as she said. Otti Berger was one of the first woman to obtain a patent for her textile design branding it with her name or her initials, establishing herself as a new kind of textile-designer, an innovator for the modern world. Otti Berger’s work, life and tragic death in Auschwitz has been a focus for research in recent years. This article is a continuation of my paper for the DAS Journal published in 2019. The focus is on attribution and on Otti Berger as a pioneer of modern textile design used in functional furniture, public transport vehicles and interior design. This article focuses on her innovations and designs for Wohnbedarf AG in Zürich.
Widar Halén
This article celebrates Norah Creswick (1883-1976), the distinguished Edinburgh-based silversmith and artist jeweller whose distinctive work was rooted in the Arts and Crafts tradition and owed much to John Ruskin’s patronage of her father-in-law, the renowned Arts and Crafts sculptor, Benjamin Creswick (1853-1946), a Sheffield knife grinder in whom Ruskin saw ‘pure and true genius’. Ruskin’s exhortation that ‘The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way’ became a core principle for the Creswick family, which Norah joined, through her marriage to the artist sculptor and silversmith, Charles Creswick (1883-1965).
Lianne Hackett
This article considers the many aspects of the work of Janice Tchalenko (1942-2018), and her interactions with the artistic world. She worked for ten years as a traditional ‘Leach-style’ potter before completely changing direction and experimenting with colour and form. She was the first potter to use on-glaze decoration on stoneware to achieve bright colours. Her new style was a major factor in shaping the change of direction in British ceramics in the 1980s. She created products for Dartington Pottery, a ‘craft’ pottery, working with Stephen Course to formulate new glazes, techniques, etc. to make her ware suitable for larger scale production. Later she worked as a designer with large industrial factories, both in Britain and in China. Many potteries were contracting at the time and faced uncertain futures; fresh designs for tableware were thought to be the answer. Throughout her life Janice continued to broaden her horizons, demonstrating her versatility in exhibitions with sculptors, weavers, fabric designers and others.
Carol Cashmore
In 1855 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert hosted a State Visit for the Emperor Napoleon and Empress Eugénie of France. For this important event rooms at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace were redecorated and furnished, with the schemes documented in watercolours. The paintings depicting Buckingham Palace, by James Roberts (c.1800-1867), are understood to be the first for these spaces in the newly completed East Wing; they provide an insight into design of the time and the use of decorative arts and interior decoration to support political diplomacy. New research into work undertaken by the cabinet-making and upholstery firm Holland & Sons for the Royal Family, has revealed their previously unappreciated involvement in these important interiors. This article is the outcome of the first research to explore the Holland & Sons company ledgers, alongside the examination of related watercolours and decorative arts surviving in the Royal Collection today.
Ellinor Gray
This paper discusses the extent of the influences of the Gothic Revival on Malta, placing them within the specific, nineteenth-century scenario of a significant British Colony with a committed Roman Catholic soul. It documents the precocious, albeit timid, appearance of Gothic Revival motifs in the third decade of the 19th century and traces them through gradual consolidation in the second half of the century in both the decorative arts and architecture, which was followed by a certain degree of acceptance and reception. This analysis also considers the more insular current where Gothic Revival motifs were applied in an eclectic manner, generally resulting from a resistance to a full acceptance of the style. More importantly, this paper discusses a small, but artistically significant corpus of ecclesiastical works imported from various centres in Europe, notably those from the immediate circle of the great instigator and visionary of the Revival in England, A.W.N. Pugin (1812-52). A combination of historical, religious and political forces facilitated the percolation of artistic currents from mainland Europe so that the Maltese Archipelago became an extension of the European and Mediterranean design ethos. In the field of the decorative arts Malta was thus transformed into a microcosm of the larger international context.
Dr Mark Sagona
In the winter of 1890 a class was begun by a local estate owner in the small village of Newton, Cambridgeshire. Like many philanthropic employers at the time the primary initiator was keen to improve the education and quality of life of workers in his community. The class would become the Newton School of Metal Work and continue to operate successfully for over half a century. The School began at the peak of the Arts & Crafts Movement as one of numerous classes under the umbrella of the Home Arts and Industries Association but it was one of a much smaller number to become both a thriving metal working school and a successful village industry. This article explores the School’s founders, key designers and workers and the organisations that influenced and shaped its success. The School was little documented during its lifetime but piecing together the history has been made much easier by the foresight of a relative of the former tutor who retained an important archive of designs and photographs. This new information has been studied and interpreted along with historical documents to tell the full story and raise the profile of this important but largely forgotten School.
David Marshall
In early 20th century France, the pochoir (‘stencil’) print was exploited by designers such as the celebrated couturier Paul Poiret (1879 - 1944) for its ‘elitist’ cachet. Poiret collaborated with pochoir illustrators such as Georges Lepape and Paul Iribe to promote his elaborate designs. This article will argue that the pochoir should be recognised as an especially important vehicle through which Poiret realized his theatrical reveries. His pochoir illustrators paid great attention to the harmonious integration of clothing and interior décor in their work, echoing a kind of mise-en-scène derived from the Ballets Russes spectacles.
Rachel Coombes
Minnie McLeish (1876-1957) is today best known for her modernist textiles but like many women working in design before the Second World War, a broader spectrum of activity defined her professional design life in the 1920s and 1930s. Until now, little has been written about her life and work, although her name and textile designs appear regularly in surveys of modern design in early 20th century Britain. This article addresses the relative obscurity of McLeish’s career and makes the case for how influential she was in her lifetime even though her contribution and broader story have been lost in the history of early 20th century British modernism. It traces her career from 1900 to the 1940s, positioning her textile work relative to the hierarchy of avant-garde art influences coming from Europe, and the discourse regarding the use of artists for design for industry in the 1920s.
Dr Keren Protheroe
In the 1920s and 30s a small group of studio figure modellers, predominantly based in Chelsea, gained significant popularity. Mainly women makers, the group included Gwendolen Parnell, Madeline Raper, Stella Crofts, Helen Wickham, and Charles and Nell Vyse. Each produced figurines individually or in a workshop, working in the manner characteristic of the emerging Studio Pottery movement. Although in recent years some attention has been given to Crofts, Parnell and the Vyses, most of the group have been given little or none, and their significance has never been collectively assessed. Contemporary accounts clearly demonstrate the inter-war popularity of the figurines and show that the group had a loyal following. The article will address the group’s work in the V&A collection and will explore the gendered reality of these women makers.
Rebecca Knott
As well as Gerald Summers of Makers of Simple Furniture, already the subject of much study, the work of another British designer, Denham Maclaren (1903-1989), stands out from that of his professional contemporaries during the interwar period of the 20th century. Until now little has been written about him, especially after his career faded in the late 1930s and only a handful of his designs have surfaced at auction since the late 1980s. An interior designer, as well as a designer of furniture, Maclaren was active only between the late 1920s and the late 1930s. His output was far less prolific than Summers’ and fewer designs were suitable for mass production. Maclaren’s wooden furniture would have been produced by skilled craftsmen on an ad hoc basis and some were made only as unique pieces. Items like lighting, tubular steel and glass furniture, however, were probably intended for limited mass production. The length of his career was also curtailed by personal problems and by the outbreak of war. His unique contribution to the history of British furniture is significant, but since so little of his work was documented, today we have difficulty identifying his designs.
Duane Kahlhamer
Within this article I hope to highlight and explore the progression of the practice of Edinburgh-based ceramic artist, Frances Priest, through works held by National Museums Scotland, and her most recent public commission for the city’s Royal Edinburgh Hospital. I shall discuss her enduring passion for The Grammar of Ornament, by the Victorian designer and polymath Owen Jones. And her desire to reconceptualise and interpret his visual explorations and documentation of pattern from across cultures, held within such Victorian design manuals. Some of these compendia are currently being re-evaluated as part of a system of western cultural appropriation. Priest, however, uses them to create works of contemporary craft that celebrate the history of the decorative arts, and the legacy of the unknown or uncelebrated craftsmen, who created the wonderful motifs and patterns held within them.
Sarah Rothwell
As the Art Nouveau movement increased awareness of the varied technical and aesthetic characteristics of Islamic and Far Eastern pottery, so the late 19th and early 20th centuries represented an extraordinary time for ceramic experimentation and innovation in Western Europe. In France, most of the novelties in pottery manufacture have been credited to major protagonists, such as Théodore Deck, Ernest Chaplet or Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat. This paper explores new evidence to suggest how interaction between three French ceramic artists, the little-known Louis Franchet and Samuel Arnaud, and the better known André Metthey, may have led to significant developments in technique and style, particularly in the use of gold craquelé or crackle-glaze. Not only was such a distinctive glaze to become a hallmark of Metthey’s later works, but it was also to become increasingly popular for Art Deco ceramists. Moreover, the infamous Paris flood of 1910 may have been an unwitting catalyst in furthering such technical experiments.
Paul Arthur
In September 1890, Charles Robert Ashbee, the founder of the Guild of Handicraft, addressed a meeting of the newly established Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, an organisation consciously modelled on his own philanthropic venture. He offered the assembled audience of local dignitaries (including the Lord Mayor), advice on how their nascent enterprise could be developed, based on the experience of his own Guild established at Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, only two years previously. By 1907, the harsh commercial realities of the early 1900s had forced Ashbee’s Guild into liquidation. Surprisingly, the Birmingham Guild not only managed to survive this difficult period but ultimately prospered, becoming one of the country’s leading architectural metalworking firms during the inter-war years. This article will explore how and why a small-scale, philanthropic ‘craft’ workshop of the late 19th century managed to evolve, adapt and ultimately, successfully re-invent itself in the 20th century.
Tony Peart
1 The Ridings, Ealing, on the Hangar Lane Estate was an unashamed flagship for the International Modernist style. It was purchased as a new build by Marion Brownlie Blackwell, whose particular taste in modernism carried through into her decorative ideas for the interior of the property. The detailed quotes for the furnishings were supplemented by large pencil and watercolour sketches and included a variety of pieces—some were bespoke designs, some were adaptations of her existing pieces, while others were handmade to off-the-peg designs.
The process of furnishing this ‘moderne’ home continued from 1933 to 1938 and is documented in an archive of correspondence, designs and brochures that has recently become accessible for research. Fortuitously two related watercolour sketches have also come to light. These previously untapped primary sources describe and illuminate the way a person of relatively modest wealth and without obvious avant-garde connections embraced a very British modernism, in a suburban context that was rooted in the ideals of the Garden City movement.
Roger Shuff Yatol
This article celebrates the pioneering 20th century artist Paule Vézelay’s lesser known career in textile design. Drawing upon research carried out in private and public collections it is written to raise awareness of Vézelay’s wider artistic output for the international arts community – where she is known primarily as a British abstract artist through her painting, sculptures, prints and drawings. Her work in the medium is highlighted through a selection of dress and furnishing fabrics from the 1940s-50s that were produced by some of the leading textile manufacturers of the period in France, Holland, and the UK. These include Société Industrielle de la Lys, Metz & Co, Ascher Ltd, David Whitehead Textiles and Heal Fabrics. It recognises the important contribution that Vézelay made as an artist, working alongside leading textile designers of the time, to help raise the standards of British textile design and manufacture in post war Britain. It is hoped that the piece might act as a catalyst for an exhibition focusing on this side of her career, or at least go some way to satisfying the public’s interest in, and appreciation of, her gift for printed textile design.
Ngozi Ikoku
Maison Christofle is a French goldsmithing company whose success has been associated for a hundred years with silver plate. The dynamism it displayed between 1965 and 1975 is exemplified by the modernisation of its production tooling, the rationalisation of its product catalogue, the redeployment of its commercial service and its emphasis on innovation. Under the direction of Albert Bouilhet (1929-2016), Vice-President then President of Christofle, new industrial, commercial and creative teams were set up throughout the enterprise. First we shall examine the situation of Christofle between 1945 and 1965, introduce the staff and the context in which they work, then look at the work created during the decade 1965-75. Among the new collections that appeared at that time, two lines in particular are examined in this paper: Christofle Contemporain and Christofle acier.
Anne Gros
The Keatley Trust, founded in 1968 by collector John Keatley, aims to purchase the finest ceramics, glass, metalwork, woodwork, furniture, prints and book bindings created over the last hundred years. These objects are subsequently lent to museums around England, for the benefit and enjoyment of the public. Comprising almost 1500 pieces, the collection reveals the history of 20th century Britain, through art. In John Keatley’s opinion, this century represents the period of greatest transformation of the lives of most people in the history of Britain, with the greatest advances in living conditions, education, health, life expectancy and prospects of the ‘ordinary man’.
The result of numerous interviews with John Keatley (a long-standing Patron of the Decorative Arts Society), this article reveals the motivations and thinking of this most generous of collectors. It illustrates the breadth of the Keatley Trust collection, highlighting pieces currently on loan to The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and details a particularly strong group of objects that were displayed at key exhibitions during the mid-1930s. Finally, it examines the significant impact of John Keatley’s active engagement with contemporary craftspeople, resulting in numerous commissions that allow makers to work to their fullest capacity, with maximum imagination.
Helen Ritchie
In 1887, to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the monarch’s coronation and the Army and Navy Club’s foundation, the Club commissioned a monumental white marble bust of Queen Victoria for display in its headquarters in Pall Mall, London. Club members awarded this prestigious commission to the highly regarded young British sculptor, Alfred Gilbert (1854–1934), who completed it in 1889. The bust remained in Club ownership until 2018, when it was saved for the nation after the Fitzwilliam Museum raised funds to prevent its export to New York. A virtuoso example of marble carving, the bust is an astonishingly unidealised yet deeply empathetic portrait of the iconic and oft-portrayed Queen-Empress. A little known and largely ignored masterpiece in Gilbert’s oeuvre, this striking bust is reconsidered here. Based on in-depth analysis and careful interpretation of surviving archival documents, as well as other contemporary textual and visual sources, this article pieces together the bust’s lengthy, complex commissioning history, situating it within the broader context of Gilbert’s mercurial life and work at this time.
Emma Jones
At the onset of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, many French artists crossed the Channel for safety; some returned home but others remained in Britain, inspired by a thriving art market. Such artists cannot be dismissed as foreigners seeking refuge, as many went on to have an impact on British artistic production. One such artist was Marc-Louis-Emmanuel Solon (1835–1913). After nearly a decade at Sèvres Pottery, Solon arrived in Stoke-on-Trent in 1870 to work for Minton’s, where he perfected the pâte-sur-pâte method of porcelain decoration in relief. Solon’s multidisciplinary beginnings in Paris led him to ceramics, a medium in which he could incorporate aspects of art-making that were of greatest interest to him - applied arts with a personalised twist on classical themes.
During his time at Minton’s, Solon sought to secure not only his own reputation but also that of ceramics, in general, as a medium. Solon’s artistic trajectory mirrors a larger theme, for the great divide between media that scholarship tends to accentuate was not recognised by Solon and his peers. Similarly, the networks traversing the Channel allowed for artists to experiment, without needing to identify exclusively with one nationality or another. Solon exemplifies a wider phenomenon and promotes a call for the reassessment of artists who made similar choices, through working in the decorative arts.
Melissa Berry
Henry van de Velde (1863–1947) is rightly regarded as one of the major precursors of Art Nouveau. Having started out as a post-Impressionist painter, he switched to applied arts and architecture in 1893 while championing the new style in practice and theory via lectures, publications, and educational courses. These two sides of van de Velde’s activity have always been studied separately, but this article explores the dialectic between his theoretical and artistic work, to create a clearer picture of van de Velde’s intellectual universe and of the literary sources in which his ideas were rooted. A range of works and thinkers linked to the French intellectual world have been identified, which transform our understanding of the artist’s intellectual horizons. The importance of Vitalism and the human body both in van de Velde’s writings and in his artistic practice will also be examined.
A dedicated study will be made of van de Velde’s furniture designs, including a famous desk of 1899 with particularly pronounced Vitalist features. His artist friends and the artistic context of his day will be shown to play a key role here. In addition, an analysis of form and style will help us better understand the process by which the artist managed gradually to master the creation of works in three dimensions.
Benjamin Zurstrassen
The Thinker, one of the most iconic sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), is celebrated for its unique harmony, potency of form, and for its complex symbolic narrative; it originated from the sculptor’s fascination with fragments. It is one of the numerous sculptures and reliefs that adorn the sculptor’s life work, The Gates of Hell. The Gates inscribe Rodin in the rich tradition of decorative portals, uniting both architectural and sculptural form and function, a tradition that can be traced from the periods of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations through classical antiquity to the present.
Involvement with architectural and decorative sculpture marked the beginning of Rodin’s career, when he worked with several different decorative artists and ornamentalists, and when he was engaged in the decoration of several buildings in Paris and Brussels. The importance of this kind of artistic foundation was emphasised by Rodin, himself, who claimed in his later years: ‘I started as a craftsman, and then I became an artist. It’s the right one, the only method’. He also had experience as a ceramic decorator working for the Sèvres Porcelain Factory. This aspect of Rodin’s career and his interest in the decorative arts had a strong impact on his sculptural production, which is explained in the example of The Thinker and its complex history and meaning.
Barbara Vujanovic
The Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter’s Seattle residence for Charles Douglas Stimson (1899–1901) introduced the English half-timbered style into Washington State at a scale that had not been attempted before. Cutter combined the ornamental vocabularies of classical, Romanesque, Moorish, Gothic, and Renaissance styles into successful residential architecture that balanced grandeur and intimacy to allow for both the formal and the casual moments in his clients’ lives. Cutter was also influenced by English Arts and Crafts designers, most notably William Morris, Philip Webb, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and Norman Shaw. He appreciated vernacular as well as high style. Indeed, he was as comfortable designing rustic Swiss chalets as he was in creating mansions.
Cutter was equally committed to interiors and furnishings. His almost obsessive devotion to detail resulted in rooms that were historically derived stage sets for living and entertaining. His work set a precedent and offered a prototype that would be copied and embellished by a host of local designers in the first decade of the twentieth century. Correspondence from Cutter, along with inventories and documentary interior photographs, provide a rare, complete picture of the design industry and designer/client relationships at the turn of the twentieth century.
Lawrence Kreisman
The Glaswegian designer and teacher Grace Wilson Melvin (1892–1977) is today celebrated neither in Vancouver, nor in her native Scotland, although she played a pivotal role in helping to expand the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (VSDAA) in British Columbia. This article aims to rectify this by highlighting the cross-cultural connections and impact of Melvin on Vancouver’s artistic community. Melvin, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) from 1907–18, and taught lettering and illumination there from 1920 to 1927, was given a leave of absence in order to travel to Vancouver to help to establish the Vancouver School. Melvin’s experience and skills gained during her time at GSA greatly influenced her teaching style and helped the VSDAA to grow and develop a diverse curriculum. She remained at VSDAA for over twenty years until her retirement in 1953. Through her publications and workbooks, including Basic Lettering for Art Students (1930), her educational impact can still be felt today. Through archival research in both the UK and Canada, this article will highlight Melvin’s impact, influence and role in Glasgow and Vancouver’s interlinked design history.
Karen Mailley-Watt
Otti Berger (1898–1944/45) was a Bauhaus designer, weaver, teacher and for a short time head of the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop. During a summer course in 1929 at the Practical Weaving School in Stockholm, she developed a fascination for old Scandinavian craft textiles, particularly the tapestry type rödlakan, rya and rag-rug weavings which came to influence her designs. She also studied the textile collections of the Museums of Decorative Arts in Oslo and in Bergen, where she had close relatives. She believed that hand and mechanical weaving should be used to mutual benefit, and she developed textiles with factories in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and in Britain. Unlike any other Bauhaus textile designer except, perhaps, Annie Albers, Berger’s reputation was international.
Berger conducted research into mixes of natural and artificial fibres that were durable and suitable for standardised production, patenting three of her inventions. Berger set up her own shop in Berlin featuring highly innovative fabrics, the focus being on the physical qualities of textiles - structure, elasticity and durability. Revolutionary light-reflecting and sound-absorbing fabrics were made in her studio, and she was one of the first female designers to use a designer label. Her avant-garde designs were shown in international exhibitions and magazines, and she frequently published articles herself. Tragically, Otti Berger was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 or 1945, the exact date being unknown.
Widar Halén
The decades between the end of the second World War and the Islamic revolution in 1979 saw a radical shift in the way that artists like Marcos Grigorian, Massoud Arabshahi and Parviz Tanavoli approached ceramics, working at the intersection of international modernism and Iranian cultural traditions to develop a new expressive language for clay. British potters also borrowed from this rich heritage, leading to an exchange of people and ideas from within the studio pottery movement. Some, like Philip Leach, lived in or travelled or travelled to Iran, while others were introduced via an exhibition organised by the British Council as part of one of the largest cultural festivals ever staged overseas. Conversely, Mohammad Mehdi Anoushfar, Monir and Mehdi Ghanbeigi and Abbas Qabchy, today among Iran’s most respected potters and professors, all spent time in England. Their stories have been largely under-appreciated to date and remain under-documented, but interviews with the artists along with previously unpublished archival records and photographs provide an interesting look at the mechanics of cross-cultural influences in ceramic design, thinking, and making in the twentieth century.
Jillian Echlin
Following his famous father’s untimely death in 1852, Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75) successfully ran the family architectural practice, restoring or designing more than one hundred Catholic churches and a handful of houses. The Granville Hotel in Ramsgate, Kent was originally conceived and designed by E. W. Pugin as a terrace of eight symmetrical holiday villas. However, it soon became his financial and mental undoing. The furnishing of the hotel complex is the subject of this article. It has been generally assumed that E. W. Pugin manufactured all of his furniture in his own workshop in Ramsgate. Known as the South Eastern Works, it produced furniture to his designs not only for the Granville Hotel, but also for other commissions such as Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire. However, contemporaneous comment in the local press suggests that the contents of the Granville Hotel were made both in Ramsgate and in London. E. W. Pugin was under financial strain when the hotel finally opened to paying guests in 1870, and he set about trying to capitalise on the new Granville designs. The emergence of two photographs dateable to before 1899 has allowed us to begin to clarify some of these attributions of the Granville furniture for the first time.
Paul A. Shutler
The RISD Museum owns the largest collection of works by the Gorham Manufacturing Company, comprising over 4,525 examples of silver, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, medals, bronze sculptures, design drawings, and watercolors. Many Gorham objects illustrate the trajectory of ‘Japanesque’ design as it transformed silver production in America and facilitated an amalgamation of Eastern design sources to permeate silver designs, forms, techniques, and ornamentation. The Furber Service, comprising hundreds of dining, serving, and decorative pieces made between 1869-80, until 1878 reflected the prevailing Renaissance Revival High Victorian style, yet pieces added after this date shifted towards Japanesque style.
Central to understanding the way in which Gorham designers and silversmiths used Japanese designs is the identification of specific volumes not valued principally as art books – although some of them were very costly – but rather actively handled on the smiths’ workbenches. Designs such as those of the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) were both copied and adapted. Gorham also incorporated Japanese metalworking technology, an aspect of Aesthetic silver that is frequently overlooked in favour of form and decoration. The extensive chromatic range of alloys and metalworking processes unique to Japanese metallurgy were integral to Gorham’s success with Japanesque designs.
Elizabeth A. Williams
At the end of 1876 Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), the prominent British designer and design theorist, realised his longstanding goal of visiting Japan, the source of distinctive art manufactures that had fascinated him for many years. This article describes how Dresser attained this goal, becoming – it is believed – the first professional designer from the West to visit Japan. Central to this story is Dresser’s relationship with the British fancy-goods importer Charles, Reynolds and Co. During the early 1870s, they established a new firm named Londos and Co which was dedicated to the acquisition, importation and sale of high-quality Japanese art manufactures. Dresser became a partner in Londos and also served as its art adviser.
Two of the firm’s earliest and most important buying assignments comprised the acquisition of large quantities of Japanese art manufactures for Londos and for Tiffany and Co, the American retailer. A careful analysis of Dresser’s relationship with Londos and Co illuminates one of his most significant characteristics: his adroitness as a strategic thinker, which is evidenced by his success in amalgamating the goals and resources of multiple entities for the purpose of visiting Japan, an experience that had a profound effect on his fortunes and artistic vision.
David A. Taylor
In an ethnic Hungarian region of what is today north-west Romania, peasant textile traditions that were in danger of dying out at the end of the nineteenth century were kept alive by one determined woman, Gyarmathy Zsigané Hory Etelka (1842–1910), who adapted the materials and patterns to suit the times. Between the wars and the shifting borders of the twentieth century, another woman, Kónya Gyuláné Schäfer Teréz (1884-1971), was largely responsible for raising the status and ensuring the survival of traditional stitching and embroidery. During the period of Communist rule and into the twenty-first century, a handful of women picked up the mantel and recorded what remained of the ancient and beautiful patterns of the open chain stitch, encouraging high quality sewing and research into these traditions.
Sara J. Meaker
Barn Close, Carlisle, was built in 1902 for the architect turned industrialist Edwin Scott-Nicholson (1873–1931). It is a house rooted in the Arts and Crafts approach prevalent in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but it belongs also to what Noel Carrington defined as ‘the post Morris period’. The carefully chosen furnishings of the interiors, assembled over the first three decades of the twentieth century, encapsulate the Arts and Crafts movement’s complex legacy and the struggle to forge a new direction for British design. William Morris textiles and William De Morgan ceramics reach back to the origins of the movement in the previous century; silver cups and covers by Omar Ramsden are consciously historicist in style, reflecting a wider love of chivalry, heraldry and pageantry; while pieces by Harold Stabler, Ambrose Heal and Harry Peach’s furnishing firms are indicative of a strong allegiance to the Design and Industries Association founded in 1915. The Barn Close collection shows both the plurality of taste in this period and the impossibility of drawing a clear line between design movements.
Esmé Whittaker
This article discusses recent research using antique black-and-white photographs of the apartments in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, Russia, created in 1894-95 for Emperor Nicholas II and his family. One can detect the ‘English taste’ in the design of the private rooms belonging to the Imperial family. This assumption is supported by the lists of companies which supplied their wallpapers and fabrics in the Russian State archives – among them are English suppliers, such as Liberty, T. G. Litchfield, Charles Hindley and Sons and Morris and Co. In 2016 a joint study of this topic was conducted by the State Hermitage Museum and the Walker Greenbank Company of Buckinghamshire. It was possible to: identify the exact Morris and Co wallpapers that were used in the decor of the passage room in the Winter Palace; study the colour schemes of some of the private interiors (visible only in black-and-white photographs); and familiarise ourselves with the process of creating wallpapers in the 1890s, and the specifics of issuing orders for the Russian Imperial family in London. New data added important information to the history of the William Morris firm, and also expanded the notion of commercial and cultural ties between the Russian Empire and Great Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Nicholas Onegin
In 1941 the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, purchased a large quantity of drawings, embroidery patterns and black and white photographs discovered at Kelmscott Manor, the former home of May Morris (1862-1938). These remained mostly uncatalogued until recent interest in May as a designer and embroiderer prompted further research. This article traces May’s creative process by considering examples from this collection, from sensitive plant studies taken directly from nature and inventive design sketches, through to the final patterns for such iconic works as the ‘Kelmscott’ bedcover. It examines her approach to line and colour, and explores her varied sources of cultural and historical influence. Important items in the Ashmolean’s collection are further highlighted in relation to William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as May’s Arts and Crafts collaborators, such as Walter Crane, Ernest Gimson, and the Pissarro family.
Caroline Palmer
The Society of Antiquaries of London has owned Kelmscott Manor, the beloved Oxfordshire country house of William Morris and his daughter, May Morris, since 1962. Support from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has allowed the Society to plan a careful repair and reordering of the Manor and its buildings, and the scheme excludes motor vehicles from the site. It makes sympathetic use of the historic barns to introduce visitors to the Manor and to cater more fully for their needs. It closes the southern side of the principal farmyard with a new Learning Building to provide educational activities and a base for an artist or craftsperson in residence. In the house, the furnishing and decoration of the rooms will approach more closely their condition in the time of the Morris family, while new and improved spaces will be provided for temporary exhibitions and to allow visitors access to scholarly resources.
John Maddison
This article on the Purnell table and vase reveals the various sources of design, from those of the connoisseur Thomas Hope to a published collection of neoclassical vases, that were used to create an unusually well realised and unique testimonial piece. Research into the recipient of the table and vase, Purnell Bransby Purnell (1791-1866), demonstrates how appropriate the design would have been to his preferences and taste.
Ann Eatwell
Designed by William Burges and painted by fourteen young artists between 1859 and 1863, the ‘Great Bookcase’ was recently displayed for the first time at the Ashmolean Museum. Made to hold books on art and architecture, it is painted with a sophisticated iconographic scheme relating to the pagan and Christian arts. Despite acknowledging that it was not ‘acceptable to present taste’, Kenneth Clark’s acquisition of the bookcase for the Ashmolean in 1933 was remarkably far-sighted. Nevertheless, it was to take over eighty years before the bookcase was placed on public display at the museum.
Matthew Winterbottom
Through visual and technical examination, this article explores the work of William Burges and other artists between 1859 and 1862 in completing the painted decoration of his ‘Great Bookcase’. In particular, it attempts to understand the various stages, methods and materials of production, and to draw parallels with Burges’ ideas on medieval furniture. Later alterations to the structure and a connected simplification of the decorative scheme are also considered as part necessary, part aesthetic, responses to the bookcase falling over and being damaged in 1878.
Jevon Thistlewood
The French enamel artist Charles Lepec (1830-90) first reached an audience outside France through his participation at the London International Exhibition of 1862. It was on this occasion that he came to the attention of Alfred Morrison (1821-97), who would become his greatest patron. When Lepec planned his stand at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, a large proportion of his display was borrowed back from Morrison. This article examines Lepec’s contribution in 1867, and how it led to widespread critical success. The opportunity is also taken, using previously unpublished contemporary documents, to examine aspects of this particular World’s Fair, and how Lepec was situated and considered in the company of his fellow participants.
Olivier Hurstel and Martin Levy
Prompted by the British Museum’s acquisition of a Pilkington’s lustreware vase given by William Burton to C. H. Read, a former Keeper at the British Museum, this article focusses on the unpublished correspondence between Burton and Read in the British Museum. Letters written between these long-standing friends over two decades reveal how the interest in contemporary manufactures fed into the huge emphasis then placed on connoisseurship – an indispensable part of any collecting activity. In so doing it uncovers much new information about the collecting world and its pre-occupations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The approach taken by Read and Burton of looking very carefully at quality and method of manufacture was basic at the time because of the problems museums across Europe were facing, which were all to do with nineteenth century reproductions and fakes. Burton’s analyses and experiments gave Read the answers he needed to identify modern copies of historic ceramics, demonstrating that relationships with contemporary manufacturers were thus a crucial part of a curator’s role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – just as they are today.
Judy Rudoe
Three important London-made art pottery collections had been acquired by the new London Museum by the end of the 1920s. A small but well-provenanced group of Doulton art pottery that had belonged to George Wallis, the keeper of the art collections at the South Kensington Museum, was purchased in 1912. A solicitor, Owen B. Gem, donated a large and significant collection of Martin ware just after the First World War. Then, in 1923, P. A.S. Phillips, a major benefactor of the London Museum, gifted a dozen pieces of William De Morgan pottery of exceptional quality, including vases and a charger in the Persian style. This article examines the motivation of the three collectors and illustrates the range of their collections. Just at the moment when these items entered the museum’s collection, fashions were changing and the appreciation and popularity of late Victorian art pottery had begun to wane.
Alex Werner
This article is an expanded version of the paper of the same title given at a symposium on the re-discovery of the Victorians at the Ashmolean Museum in May 2016. Drawing on the recent acquisition by the V&A Archive of Art and Design of the Handley-Read Family Papers, it sheds some new light on Charles Handley-Read’s thoughts about the philosophy of collecting, and his ideas for the future of the Handley-Read Collection, largely in his own words.
Charlotte Gere
Most histories of modern ceramics and glass tend to focus on the avant-garde. Instead, this article explores the overlooked potential of historicist design, viewed through the lens of a small and, in some ways, remote nation’s material culture -- Norway. In spite of rich craft traditions, Norway had little history for ceramics and glass. Catering to national sympathies in an age of rapid modernisation, these new designs alluded to the national heritage whilst simultaneously reshaping its subject. A range of case studies traces this development.
Peder Valle
George Wragge Ltd was one of the key stained glass providers for secular decorative glazing schemes in Manchester and Salford, and one of the most significant stained glass makers in the North of England at the height of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Upon his retirement at the age of forty-five, George Wragge (1863-1932) had established and overseen an extremely successful business in the applied arts, including stained glass, and had been managing a group of talented individuals whose work was responsive to a variety of contexts. Their dynamism and skill combines to create spectacular compositions in stained and decorative glass in some of Manchester’s most opulent buildings of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. There is a lack of knowledge and awareness of the significance of companies such as Wragge’s, who were active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article aims to broaden the scope of enquiry into Arts and Crafts stained glass to include domestic, recreational and commercial contexts, settings which had fewer constraints on form and content of windows as compared with ecclesiastical settings.
Veronica Smith
Arthur Romney Green began making furniture in 1900, only after having worked for some years as a maths teacher in South Africa, and is probably less well-known than certain other craftsmen identified with the Cotswold School. However, his extensive writing, which includes an unpublished autobiography, sheds new light on the left-leaning craft communities to which he belonged, as well as on his own evolution as a woodworker. His style would be formed in part by fellow craftworkers in Haslemere and Hammersmith, and through the creative partnership he long maintained with his brother, a successful architect. His own inner resources included his original calling of mathematics and a belief in breadth of experience as the key to creativity.
Neil Hyman
This article presents an overview of many of the designers, makers and artists who moved to the new Garden City of Letchworth, Hertfordshire, in the years from its beginnings in 1903 to the First World War.These included Alec Hunter and the St Edmundsbury Weaving Works; the bookbinder Douglas Cockerell; W. H. Cowlishaw and the Iceni Pottery; and the woodworker Stanley Parker. The article examines the concept of the ‘Simple Life’, so important to many of those who made the pioneering move to the new town. An appendix gives brief information on thirty key figures.
Ros Allwood
