THE MILLINERY WORKS GALLERY

DOVETAILED & DOWELLED

The Handmade Tradition of 

the Arts & Crafts Movement

A selling exhibition presented by The Antique Trader

7 to 26 June 2005

   Left exhibit 1 Click on small image to enlarge then click back to return to this page

“I never felt myself apart from my own times by harking back to the past - to be complete we must live in all the tenses - past, future as well as present.”

Ernest Gimson

Following the Arts & Crafts’ dictum expounded by Pugin, Ruskin and Morris, this exhibition illustrates truth to 
materials, honesty in construction and beauty of design.

The handmade tradition of the Arts & Crafts Movement was carried forward in the twentieth century most notably by Gimson, the Barnsleys and the followers of what became known as the Cotswold School. Their furniture used wood in the solid with a wide variety of chamfering and bold dovetails and dowels, with tenons, wedged or double-wedged, sometimes with ebony and all exposed to illuminate the beauty of the design.

This revealed construction was carried further into the twentieth century by the urbane sophistication of Betty Joel’s designs of the 1920s and 30s, her upbringing in the Orient also influencing many of her designs.

This philosophy was an inspiration for modernism where today the architecture of, for example, Richard Rogers’ Lloyds building and Norman Foster’s Swiss Re (The Gherkin) combine the essentials of construction with an integral beauty of design.

We are particularly grateful to Mary Greensted for the following essay.
Brian Thompson, The Millinery Works.

Continue with catalogue

back to Home page