I've started a new group on the professional networking site www.LinkedIn.com. the group's name is 'Design 1850-1950' and offers a place for like minded people to discuss all decorative arts designed and made between 1850 and 1950. click on the image to find out more.

'in the Howard style'. A description increasingly used to describe any Victorian upholstered armchair with feather cushions, either based on fact or simply hope!

 

The following is a portion of short essay written by myself a few years ago. Using business trading addresses I managed to trace Howard & Sons activities from the 19th and well into the 20th century.

 

A Brief History of Howard & Sons, Berners St, London.

 

In 1820 John Howard started trading at 24 Lemon St, London, as a ‘Cabinet Manufacturer’. He was to stay there for nine years until he moved premises to 27 Great Alie St.  and then later in 1832 he was to move the small distance to 34 Great Alie St where he would stay and open an upholstery workshop/showroom at 36 Red lion St until 1845 (the Red Lion premises were only used for one year).

 

It wasn’t until 1848 after a short period of non-trading that the company was to take on part of the address more familiar with the company. In 1848 John Howard and Sons started trading at 22 Berners St as ‘Cabinet Maker, Upholsterer and Decorator’. In 1853 John Howard expanded the business into 26 Berners St.

 

From 1861-89 and 1865-68 there were workshops at Tottenham St, Charlotte Mews and Fitzroy Sq respectively. After Crystal Palace 1862 saw the first big break for the company when they won a prize at only the second Exhibition they attended, the prize was for suite of library furniture.

 

In 1865 the young George Howard patented a method for veneering walls with a wooden veneer, instead of wall paper or paint, This was to evolve into flooring which prompted George to take out a patent in 1867 on the improved production of parquet flooring. From 1865 Howard and Sons were listed as ‘Upholsterers, Cabinet Makers and Parquet Flooring Manufacturers by Steam Power’. A further four patents were subsequently taken out on the manufacture and fixing of parquetry to floors and ceilings in November 1879, July 1880 and July and December 1883.

 

In 1866 George Howard Patented something that would secure his family’s company a place in history, he patented the ‘Elastic Seat’. His patent totally re-designed the inside workings of traditional upholstery, creating the superior seat, is what they are now widely known only for.

 

1872 saw the company’s most significant move when they settled at the address 25, 26 and 27 Berners St, this was only after they consolidated their workshops in 1869 to the Cleveland Works in Cleveland St. These addresses were to remain unchanged until 1935. Howard and sons were to exhibit and win prizes from this address at the 1878 International Exhibition, the 1894 Antwerp Exhibition and win 1 silver and 2 gold medals at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.

 

Howard and Sons became a limited company in 1899, and advertised in 1920 as manufacturers of ‘Parquet Floors by Electric Power’, and were awarded a royal warrant

 

In 1935 Howard and Sons traded from 31 Old Burlington St where they produced mainly upholstered furniture and then ceased trading in 1947. This was the end of the cabinet making side of the firm under the name ‘Howard’,owardHo as after seven years of silence in 1954 the well established house decorators Lenygon and Morant Ltd advertised as being ‘Makers of Howard Chairs and Sofas’ from their address at 48 South Audley St, this lasted until 1959 when the name was once again silent. Chairs made using the howard methods are today available widely.

 

Howard and Sons would make identification easier by marking their work. Cabinet work would either have paper labels, stamps and ,on later pieces, Ivorine labels. Upholstered furniture would have either a name and/or number stamp on the inside of the back foot, a paper label on the hessian or a name stamp on the castor cup or wheel. The content (i.e. address) on the stamp varies depending on the date of the piece.

 

Instant identification however can be determined by their favoured use of a variation of turning on the front legs, generally speaking the more squashed this turning the later the piece.

 

Some upholstered pieces retain their initialled calico covering, either this or a floral calico were used on all upholstered pieces and were usually covered using a well fitted loose cover also made by Howard and Sons. Both the initialled and floral covers came in a limited range of colours.

 

Paul A. Shutler

 

Copyright Paul A. Shutler 2011 (acknowledgment required when reproducing all or any portion of the attached research)

The humble yet beautiful armchair from the 'Sussex Rush Seated' range was   retailed by Morris & Company from around 1860 well into the 20th century.

The design is widely attributed to Philip Webb and they were probably manufactured by   a High Wycombe maker for retail at Morris & Co's London showroom.

The range of chairs quickly became famous and were regarded as an icon of artistic taste, they were found in the homes of many artists from Burne Jones to Alfred Gilbert.

With fame comes imitation, rival retailers such as Liberty's, Hamptons and Heals all sold their own versions, none of which quite compared to the Morris & Co versions.

There is one simple way to identify a genuine Morris and Co armchair.

The spindle design shown above is the only design used by Morris and Company, if a chair doesn't have them, it's an imposter!!

Paul

An article written for the 2010 Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies has now been published, follow this link to read an extract and buy the Journal.

http://appraiserworkshops.blogspot.com/2010/05/importance-of-provenance.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AppraiserWorkshops+%28Appraiser+Workshops%29

Enjoy !

P

What makes one of these chairs worth considerably more than the other?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Courtesy of Sotheby's & Paul Reeves.            Courtesy of a Private Collection, London.

The chair on the left would retail in excess of £15,000 and the chair on the right for a mere £2,000. So why the big difference? both are of equal quality and dimensions.

The right hand chair has a lower stretcher than the left hand chair, it's a simple as that.

In 1977 'Art Furniture from designs by E.W.Godwin' was published, the designs were made by the cabinet maker William Watt of London. Plate no. 15 of this catalogue shows Godwin's design for an armchair (below). This chair is known as the 'Old English or Jacobean Armchair'.

Godwin designed the chair with the stretchers high up under the seat. Today only a handful of chairs are known that follow the designer's drawing exactly whereas numerous examples of the chair on the right exist, this is reflected in the retail value.

It's clear Godwin didn't want the stretchers to be visible from a standing position and so tucked them away under the seat, aesthetically great, structurally not so.

With William Watt as the documented maker of these chairs it is highly likely that, being a cabinet maker, he took it upon himself to improve Godwin's design and make the chair more sturdy. Whether this was approved by Godwin is not known.

After all is it just as simple to make the chair with the stretcher high up as it is to make it lower down. Some opinions are that it makes more sense to fix a round stretcher in a square section of wood as with the left hand chair, I disagree, having the rail so high up renders it next to useless, where having it further down on the other hand allows it to serve a purpose.

Various plagiarised versions of this chair exist that exhibit slight differences ranging from over lumpy finials to different turnings to the legs, the chair on the right only has the stretcher lower down the legs, that's it.

And so ultimately the chair on the left was 'designed by E.W. Godwin' and the chair on the right is 'after E. W. Godwin's Design'.

Paul

This question not only applies to chairs but to all antiques. When you buy antique furniture or works of art with provenance you don't only buy four legs and a seat you buy your very own piece of history.

Sure the identical self made furniture from the catalogue is fine for bookshelves or to hold a dusty collection of DVDs if you need to, I have eight huge bookcases straining to hold my ever increasing library. I'm not ashamed, they're useful !

Useful they are but they're souless too, cold and dead straight from the box their only mystery being assembly. In their life all they have seen is me standing in front of them head down totally oblivious of them and when I move house they'll no doubt fall apart and then be replaced having only known someone who ignored them.

Antiques are different, standing only a few inches from the bookcases is an armchair designed by arguably the most important gothic architect to the arts and crafts movement and made for his most important commission: The Law Courts on the Strand in London.

This armchair was first used not by a man who couldn't even open the box it was delivered in but a high court Judge with more important things on his mind. Things like 'does this man deserve the death sentence for his part in.....' or 'if I allow women the vote.....'

Not all histories will be this intense though, take the portrait plaque on the current stock page, it represents a successful artist and writer's respect for a member of his staff who dedicated thirty years of her life to his family's service.

Thirty years of cleaning, cooking and nursing his children, for most people at his level of society a simple wage and a roof over her head would have sufficed, not for Lewis Foreman Day he took the time to create a permanent depiction of her and displayed it for all to see, the staff didn't use the back stairs in his houshold !!

Paul

Often my clients come to me for advice when considering purchasing an item from another dealer or at auction, in some cases they are interested in objects described by the seller as 'rare' or 'extremely rare' or 'extremely rare and highly important'. 

So, I decided to include my repeated response in the blog:

Ask the seller why they think the object is rare, In most cases I can explain instantly why something may or may not be rare, certainly if I was describing something as rare I would make sure I could do this.

It's worth remembering that if something is rare it may be simply because the maker decided not to continue making an object because it just wasn't very pleasing, meaning not all rare objects are good objects.

Something might be considered rare because a fixed number of them are known to have been made, but how high can this number go? It is a known fact that Gerald Summers made only 120 one-piece plywood chairs of circa 1933-4, does this make them rare?

It could be considered important given that it's a great example of a chair successfully made using only a single sheet of plywood, no fixings or joints, an industrial designers dream.

Image from The Vitra Design Museum's book 100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design Museum Collection.

Questions also need to be asked when dealing with the description important. Being rare doesn't automatically make something important, for a work of art or an antique to be described as important shouldn't it mean it had a part to play or was responsible for something of note? A useful example would be Aurthur Heygate Mackmurdo's famous mahogany side chairs of circa 1882 (one example is in the collection of The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), they are universally considered to be important because their sinuous Art Nouveau design pre-dates the Art Nouveau period by a decade. 

To be of use, the word important should be followed by the word because. Often these words are used to illustrate and highlight the object's significance but sadly they can also be used to embellish an otherwise ordinary (but perfectly genuine) object.

I have recently been fortunate enough to acquire an occasional table (see my current stock page) that I consider to be worthy of this seemingly disposable four letter word for these reasons:

Firstly, the table was designed by Owen Jones, a man known to only design furniture on a commision basis.

Secondly, this particular commission was for the copper mining magnate James Mason Esq. of Eynsham Hall, Oxfordshire. Helpfully the drawings for this commission survive, they clearly display all the furniture and decoration to be included in each room. Amongst the sets of chairs and tables in the drawing room there is just one occasional table. Meaning only one occasional table was ever made. 

That is not merely rare but unique.

 

Paul

This Blog has also been published on The Personal Property Appraisers Post Blog

       Having read through countless books and catalogues, viewed many sales and visited numerous houses I have noticed a trend; all attribute a type of chair with a distinctive ladder back as a ‘Clissett’ chair, but why?

      The story of the chair begins with John Kerry (1820-1861) of Evesham, Worcestershire routinely making ash armchairs (fig 1) with the distinctive ladders, stamping them ‘KERRY EVESHAM’. It was not until 1886 that the Scottish architect James Maclaren (1852-1890) suggested an alteration to Phillip Clissett’s (1817-1913) standard Ash and Elm spindle back chair (fig 2); his suggestions incorporated the ladders from the earlier chair produced by the Kerry family.

       It is thought that the resulting design was then produced by Clissett and shown to the Art Worker's Guild through Maclaren.

fig 1, The English Regional Chair, 1990, Dr B. Cotton, page 294

fig 2, The English Regional Chair, 1990,   Dr B. Cotton, page 293

      From the late 1880’s a short backed version of this newly adapted chair (fig 3) was used in the hall of the Art Worker's Guild (fig 4), this version was the same as Clissett’s spindle back chair but with Kerry’s three rung   ladder back. This exposure to the top architects and craftsmen of the day prompted a plethora of chair designs that fundamentally follow the culmination of chair designs laid down by John Kerry, Phillip Clissett and blended by James Maclaren.

fig 3, The English Regional Chair, 1990, Dr B. Cotton, page 300

fig 4,   The Art Worker's Guild

     Phillip Clissett was known to have made these chairs himself until beyond his ninetieth year (1908), his standard spindle back chairs are usually stamped P. C. on the top of the back foot, however, to date there is no record of a ladder back chair with this stamp.

     During 1890, Ernest Gimson (1864-1919) visited Clissett’s Bosbury (Herefordshire) workshop where the two worked together, with Gimson being taught how to make chairs using a pole lathe. Gimson returned to Sapperton (Gloucestershire) and in 1895 made ladder back chairs to his own design, with rounded ladders and a straight back foot.

     Later in 1904 Gimson instructed his chair maker Edward Gardiner (18??-1958) to make chairs identical to Clissett’s. These chairs are identifiable as they show evidence of Gardiner’s marking out, in the form of fine score marks used to indicate the positioning of ladders and rails, this was done on all of Gardiner’s chairs, and is something Clissett didn't need to do.

     Edward Gardiner continued to make these chairs until his death, in his workshop in Priors Marston (Warwickshire). From then to the present day the designs from Gardiner’s 19?? Catalogue were made by his pupil since 1939, Neville Neal and then from 1966 to the present day by his son Lawrence Neal and are stamped Neville Neal and Lawrence Neal respectively.

     As with most successful designs of the period such as Morris & Co's Sussex chairs and Godwin's ebonised occasional tables, the design was copied by the leading makers and retailers. Morris & Co, Liberty's, Heals, Norman & Stacey all had versions of this ladder back chair so too did the architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) and Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941).

Morris & Co, c1910   catalogue   (green or brown stain)

C. R. Mackintosh, c1893 (green stained oak)

Norman & Stacey, c1910 catalogue   (fumed oak)

     With all of these chairs sharing the same distinctive ladder shape, a shape originally taken from a Evesham chair made by the Kerry family of chair makers, shouldn't they be called 'Kerry' chairs?

Paul

The English Regional Chair, Dr B Cotton, 1990
Good Citizen's Furniture, Annette Carruthers & Mary Greensted, 1994
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, The Complete Furniture Drawings and Interior Designs, Roger Billcliffe, 1979
Morris & Co, furniture Catalogue Circa 1910
Norman & Stacey, Catalogue of Furniture, Decorations, Carpets and Antiques, 1910

Following a recent discussion with a Sally Anne Huxtable of the Dallas Museum of Art about The Gertrude Jekyll flower vase in our current stock, I decided to start a blog.

I quote Sally,

"The vase is quite fantastic and is obviously the Grandmother of contemporary mass produced vase design"

She is right, the vase was designed circa 1885 but is comparable to a Scandanavian example circa 2009 (mentioning no names).

With a huge following, Gertrude Jekyll is known as the finest and most influential arts and crafts garden designer to live. She is famous for her 'waves of colour' planting schemes, but it seems she should now be known for her ability to design simple vases that display fine blooms effeciently enough to stand the test of modern fickle fashions and time...124 years to be precise.

Something to think about !!

Paul