Ernest Gimson as a designer

Magazine Antiques, June, 2002 by Mary Greensted

Ernest William Gimson (P1. I) was one of the most inspiring and influential designers of the British arts and crafts movement. His contemporary, the architect William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931), described his 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." (1) In the 1930s the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner called Gimson "the greatest of the English artist-craftsmen." (2) More recently Peter Stansky singled him out as "arguably the best English furniture maker of the period." (3) Gimson's strong creative streak, his modesty, and his unassuming nature prevented him from explaining or promoting his work. Although he may not have achieved the worldwide recognition of some of his contemporaries, his work remains a potent legacy for contemporary designers and makers.

Gimson was born in 1864 in the market town of Leicester, which had expanded dramatically as a result of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. The Gimson family fortunes mirrored this expansion. His grandfather had been a carpenter, and Josiah Gimson (1818-1883), his father, worked as an iron founder before setting up his own factory making heavy machinery. Josiah Gimson had a strong social conscience and a sense of civic duty that led him to stand for election to the city council in 1877 as a Liberal. He was one of the largest employers in the city, and prided himself on the favorable wages and conditions he offered his workers. He died in 1883 when Ernest Gimson was eighteen, and the business was entrusted to three older brothers. That same year Ernest Gimson was articled to a local architect.

In January 1884 William Morris (1834-1896), poet, designer, socialist, and father figure of the arts and crafts movement, visited Leicester to deliver a lecture entitled "Art and Socialism." As leading members of the Leicester Secular Society, which had issued the invitation, Ernest Gimson and his older brother Sydney (1860-1938) were responsible for looking after Morris and waited nervously at the Leicester railway station to meet him. Within two minutes they were put at ease by his "delightfully breezy, virile personality" (4) Morris dined with the Gimsons that evening, and the conversation, which went on until nearly two in the morning, included the recommendation that Ernest Gimson should continue his architectural training in London. Morris subsequently provided him with letters of introduction to a number of architects, including John Dando Sedding (1838-1891), whose office Gimson joined in 1886.

The London to which Gimson came as an architectural student was the center for new ideas about the arts, and organizations such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Art Workers' Guild and its offshoot, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society were newly established there. These groups provided a heady mixture of art, handwork, politics, and social economics for the younger generation emerging from the major architectural offices. The motto of the Art Workers' Guild, founded in 1884, was "The Unity of the Arts," and the idea of handwork, of practicing as well as designing for a variety of crafts, fired up a generation. The bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922) related his own conversion to handwork during an evening he spent with Morris and his wife, Jane (1839-1914), in 1883:

I was talking to Mrs Morris after supper, and saying how anxious I was to use my hands -- "Then why don't you learn bookbinding?" she said. "That would add an Art to our little community, and we would work together. I should like," she continued, "to do some little embroideries for books and I would do so for you," Shall bookbinding then be my trade? (5)

Gimson also sought firsthand experience in craftwork. His earliest designs, from about 1886, were for embroideries. Morris's firm encouraged interest in needlework among artistically inclined women by providing designs by himself and others for sale alongside the completed embroideries. Gimson's half-sister, Sarah (1844-1915), worked one of Morris and Company's designs, which may have inspired him to produce his own designs for samplers, tablecloths, and runners for her and others (see P1. TV).

He also took up decorative plasterwork, an architectural craft that by the mid-nineteenth century was carried out in semiskilled workshops producing standard cornices and rosettes or elaborate moldings cast from brass or wood originals. In the 1880s the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was one of a number of artists and architects to produce designs for plasterwork, and an exhibition of the craft was held at the Art Workers' Guild in 1887. Gimson was inspired to design for plaster but wanted to execute his own designs. During the summer of 1890 he came to an arrangement with the London firm of Whitcombe and Priestly, working with their craftsmen on orders for plasterwork but also paying the firm for the experience, working space, and materials to develop his own designs.