Described in his time, as ‘the greatest of the English architect-designers’, Leicester-born Ernest Gimson (1864-1919) is considered to be one of the most influential designers of the Arts and Crafts movement. At the age of 20, he attended a lecture on 'Art and Socialism' given by the leader of the Arts and Crafts Revival in Victorian England, William Morris, who later took an interest in the young designer.
In 1890, Gimson became a founder member of the short-lived furniture company, Kenton and Co., whose members acted as designers rather than craftsmen and explored inventive new ways of recreating traditional crafts: ‘the common facts of traditional building’. Following the collapse of the company, Gimson and two other members of Kenton and Co., Sidney and Ernest Barnsley, moved to the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire in 1893 ‘to live near to nature’. In 1900, Gimson set up a small furniture workshop in Cirencester, later moving to larger workshops at Daneway House.
His friend, the architect and writer W R Lethaby, described Gimson’s furniture as, ‘one kind of ‘perfect’, that is it was useful and right, pleasantly shaped and finished, good enough but not too good for ordinary use’. Gimson believed that design was not something to be added once the work was finished, rather it should come from the careful use of proportion and construction, choice and knowledge of materials, tools and techniques. For these designs, he drew inspiration from nature, Byzantine and Islamic arts, English furniture of the 17th and 18th centuries, and, of course, from the Arts and Crafts tradition.
By the 1920s, the Cotswold style of furniture developed by Gimson and the Barnsleys was seen as the inspiration for modern design in the twentieth century and it has continued to influence designers and makers.
Find out more...
Click here to visit the Ernest Gimson website, run by Leicester Council - www.gimson.leicester.gov.uk
Images courtesy of Law Fine Art.
