Furniture designers and craftsmen
Among the many furniture makers and designers associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, the leading figures included:
- C.F.A. Voysey
Charles Francis Annersley Voysey was a prolific architect, like many of the Arts and Crafts furniture designers, and as well as fine woodwork, metalwork, textiles and wallpapers created complete interior schemes for his houses. His pieces often include his trademark pierced heart, one of the key motifs of the movement. Shown here is Voysey's Kelmscott Chaucer cabinet, commissioned to house the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, hand-printed at William Morris's Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith.
- Gimson and the Barnsleys
Ernest Gimson and the two Barnsley brothers - Sidney and Ernest - were architects and pioneers of the Cotswold School, moving together to rural Gloucestershire where they worked closely with local craftsmen to revive and reinterpret traditional skills. Their output ranged from simple cottage furniture to luxury pieces of the highest craftsmanship. The picture shows a detail of a settle by Sidney Barnsley.
- C.R. Ashbee
Charles Robert Ashbee was a furniture, metalwork and jewellery designer who formed the Guild of Handicraft in the East End of London, later relocating the entire operation - craftsmen and their families - to an old silk mill in the Cotswolds. Pictured here is a detail from a Guild piano cover.
- Ambrose Heal
Ambrose Heal was a furniture designer, craftsman and later chairman of Heals, the store founded by his great-grandfather. His work, simple, practical and well made, brought the principles of Arts and Crafts design to the mass marketplace. The image shows a detail from from his "Fine Feathers" mahogany tallboy.
- Gordon Russell
Another Cotswolds Arts and Crafts designer, Gordon Russell ran a large furniture company in Broadway, in later years branching into industrial design and leading the wartime utility furniture programme. Here's a detail from a bedhead.
Other key practitioners included of course William Morris himself, M.H. Baillie Scott and Philip Webb, and other commercial firms operating under the Arts and Crafts banner included Liberty's, which produced work of great quality.
The movement left a heritage of intelligent, modest and sympathetic design that prepared the ground for Modernism and is still influential today.