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