Ernest Gimson who died on 11 August 1919 was described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as ‘the greatest of the English artist-craftsmen’. He made significant contributions as an architect, a maker of plasterwork and turned chairs, and a designer of embroideries and metalwork but is probably best known today for his furniture. So how do you […]
This is a year of centenaries and celebrations. Any of you lucky enough to be in London before 22nd April should head straight for Two Temple Place, that extraordinary Gothic mansion beside the Thames, just along from the Savoy Hotel.
This is a year of centenaries and celebrations. Any of you lucky enough to be in London before 22nd April should head straight for Two Temple Place, that extraordinary Gothic mansion beside the Thames, just along from the Savoy Hotel.
A new book titled Ernest Gimson: Arts and Crafts Designer and Architect written by Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted and Barley Roscoe is being published by Yale University Press in October 2019. Ernest Gimson has been described as ‘the greatest of the English artist-craftsmen’ (Pevsner 1960) and was a central figure in the British Arts and […]
The Arts and Crafts Movement was a deeply serious philosophical, practical and committed response to the industrialization of England, its ‘green and pleasant land’ in danger of being blackened by the ever burgeoning factories and the movement of the rural population to the sprawling, insanitary slums surrounding the industrial cities, epitomized by Charles Dickens’s Coketown […]
Fiona MacCarthy in William Morris: A Life for Our Time, describes Morris recalling nostalgically the poplar meadows and little villages of the Somme as well as the long straight roads of Picardy seemingly stretching into eternity: “Those long straight roads of Northern France”, she wrote, “remained in Morris’s mind as they would remain in the […]
Early last month Elaine and I did a preliminary reconnaissance for next June’s Normandy and Picardy tour. Starting in Chartres we followed William Morris’s route through Dreux, Evreux and Louviers to Rouen, revelling in those great gothic cathedrals which inspired not only Morris, but also Pugin, William Burges and others. Morris described the journey that […]
If you are interested in the Arts & Crafts Movement – a little or a lot – I heartily encourage you to give our small group tours a try. What makes a good trip? Lots of advance research. Unless you like to go to the same place over and over (I know many people who go to Paris every chance they get, for example), it’s disappointing to spend a lot of money and time visiting a new destination only to learn later that there were specific places you could have visited, but didn’t know about while you were there.
As summer advances and turns into autumn a wide and impressive variety of tributes are being paid this year to the ten million soldiers who died during the First World War. The 8th of August marked the centenary of the Battle of Amiens, which, although not decisive in itself, is seen in the light of history as marking the beginning of the end of that war.
John Ruskin described Gothic as ‘not only the best but the only rational architecture… Undefined in its slope of the roof, height of shaft, breadth of the arch, or disposition of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded grace […]