E W Godwin

In the first section of this work, ten scholars examine E.W. Godwin's life and career, discussing his diverse contributions as a design reformer. The second section presents a fully annotated selection of over 150 items that represent the formation and flowering of Godwin's oeuvre.

Japan held a profound fascination for western artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the influence of Japonisme on western art was pervasive. Paradoxically, just as western artists were beginning to find inspiration in Japan and Japanese art, Japan was opening to the western world and beginning a process of thorough modernisation, some have said westernisation. The mastery of western art was included in the programme. This book examines the nineteenth century art world against this background and explores Japanese influences on four artists working in Britain in particular: the American James McNeill Whistler, the Australian Mortimer Menpes, and the 'Glasgow boys' George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel. Japonisme in Britian is richly illustrated throughout.

Oscar Wilde's imagination was haunted by ancient Greece; this book traces its presence in his life and works.

Victorian furnishers and decorators Collinson & Lock were a model of the art furniture business of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This book is the first wide-ranging study of this once highly important company. It will give insights into the workings and productions of a London furnishing business in the period. It also provides information on a wide variety of topics including furniture design developments, interior design styles, business practices, working practices and techniques, and the firm’s customers and competitors. Clive Edwards first considers the structure of the London ‘art furniture’ trade and its development to locate the firm in its community. He then traces the growth of the firm’s business, its involvement with important international exhibitions, the designers they worked with, and the furniture and interiors they produced. This important book then outlines and discusses Collinson & Lock’s creations ranging from seminal pieces that were designed for an exclusive clientele, to those displayed at national and international exhibitions between 1871 and 1900, through to batch produced objects that still maintained the quality and design that the firm was famous for. The involvement of the firm with both public and private interior decoration commissions is also examined through case studies, including those in the Anglo-Japanese, Queen Anne, Old English, and Renaissance styles used in the later Victorian period. Drawing on the author's extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century furniture and interiors, this book meets a need for a fully researched and illustrated reference work on this famous firm. If you have an interest in the history of furniture and interior design, if you are involved with furniture collections either on a private basis or professionally, or you simply have an interest in the decorative arts and culture of the period, this book should be on your shelves.

A beautifully illustrated art history and cultural biography, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities focuses on one of the most influential artistic quarters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – London’s Tite Street, where a staggering amount of talent thrived, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent. For Wilde, the street was full of ‘wonderful possibilities’, while for Whistler it was ‘the birthplace of art’, where a new brand of aestheticism was nurtured in his controversial White House. Modern masterpieces in art and literature flowed from the studios and houses of Tite Street, but this bohemian enclave had a dark side as well. Here Whistler was bankrupted, Frank Miles was sent to an asylum, Wilde was imprisoned, and Peter Warlock was gassed to death. Throughout its turbulent existence, Tite Street mirrored the world around it. From the Aesthetic movement and its challenge to Victorian values, through the Edwardian struggle for women’s suffrage, to the bombs of the Blitz in the 1940s, it remained home to innumerable artists and writers, socialites and suffragettes, musicians and madmen. The Street of Wonderful Possibilities reveals this complex history, tying together private and professional lives to form a colourful tapestry of art and intrigue, illuminating their relationships to each other, to Tite Street and to a rapidly modernising London at the fin de siècle.

What was different about the environments that women created as architects, designers and clients at a time when they were gaining increasing political and social status in a male world? Through a series of case studies, Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, examines in detail the professional and domestic spaces created by women who had money and the opportunity to achieve their ideal. Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities. It offers new information and new interpretations in the study of gender, material culture and the built environment in the period 1860-1960.

Through a series of case studies from the mid-eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, this collection of essays considers the historical insights that ethno/auto/biographical investigations into the lives of individuals, groups and interiors can offer design and architectural historians. Established scholars and emerging researchers shed light on the methodological issues that arise from the use of these sources to explore the history of the interior as a site in which everyday life is experienced and performed, and the ways in which contemporary architects and interior designers draw on personal and collective histories in their practice. Historians and theorists working within a range of disciplinary contexts and historiographical traditions are turning to biography as means of exploring and accounting for social, cultural and material change - and this volume reflects that turn, representing the fields of architectural and design history, social history, literary history, creative writing and design practice. Topics include masters and servants in eighteenth-century English kitchens; the lost interiors of Oscar Wilde's 'House Beautiful'; Elsa Schiaparelli's Surrealist spaces; Jean Genet, outlaws, and the interiors of marginality; and architect Lina Bo Bardi's 'Glass House', São Paulo, Brazil.