The designers at Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disneyland Tokyo & DisneySea have filled their rooms with some especially beautiful lamps, fixtures & shades, many of them in various Arts & Crafts & related styles. Flickr user Tavie has done the hard work for us by photographing 257 of them & putting them up in a photo set.
metalwork
Voysey’s clocks: miscellany
After Wednesday’s post, I’ve been reading a lot about Voysey and his clocks.
He didn’t design all that many, but many contemporary designers – and several contemporary to Voysey – have built clocks in his style. Here are a few originals & paeans to them:
- Christopher Vickers’ clocks, mentioned yesterday, among which most are after Voysey;
- Dickins Auctioneers sold several original Voysey clocks, notably a painted mantel clock for £141,000, an unpainted version for £72,400, and a third for £7,400;
- I’ve got a very high-resolution image of the painted mantel clock available on Flickr (thanks to the Victoria & Albert Museum for that) – this is the clock that was bought from John Jesse for £30,000 in 1998. It is presumed to have belonged to Voysey himself and was made circa 1896;
- Liberty & Co produced a striking polished pewter and enamel clock "in style of Charles Voysey";
- Stickley & Morawe’s clocks were clearly influenced very strongly by Voysey; and
- Hill House Antiques has a Voysey-influenced (complete with heart inlay!) clock for sale.
Christopher Vickers & CFA Voysey
I first encountered Christopher Vickers’ work when a friend showed me photos of a clock he built (he’s also reproduced another famous Voysey clock with which you may be more familiar). Based on C. F. A. Voysey’s original plans, the clock is built from 7,000-year-old bog oak, and is inlaid with (faux) ivory. The original was built by Voysey in 1921 for a client – the same one for whom Voysey designed the beautiful Holly Mount in Beaconsfield. Voysey was known for his clocks, of course; apparently, he loved the confluence of lettering, machine, and furniture that these tiny and complicated objects represented.Vickers is a scholar of all things Voysey, and 20th-century British design in general, with quite a bit of background on this great and often overlooked designer / artist / architect on his website; my own love of Voysey’s work springs mainly from my interest in typography and Voysey’s wonderful and expressive hand-lettering (see the wallpaper advertisement here, taken from Mr. Vickers’ site) – so seeing Vickers’ exceptional work, and through it his obvious love for the combined subtlety and detail that I’ve always appreciated in Voysey, really impressed and resonated with me.
My favorite piece of Voysey-designed furniture in Vickers collection is this replica dining chair with arms, originally designed in 1902. Vickers’ reproduction sells for £1850, and appears to be completely true to the original.
Other impressive bits of Mr. Vickers’ work include unique items of Arts & Crafts lighting; a number of beautiful and useful chests in a variety of sizes and configurations; beautiful and sturdy tables, including some based on Voysey designs for Hollymount and other homes; inlaid wooden boxes; cabinetry and shelving, including several that feature hardware hand-forged by Vickers; and a number of pieces of metalwork, produced in the Gimson-Cotswold tradition in just the way we like it: "by hammer & hand."
Vickers’ work is art and craft, and some of the finest contemporary A&C furniture I’ve seen. If you’re interested, you can see pieces on display from September 10 to 24 at the 2nd annual Arts & Crafts Exhibition in Gloucestershire’s Prinknash Abbey Park; from September 13 to 28, you can actually visit his workshop in Frome, as it will be open to the public during Somerset Art Weeks. His work will also be included in the Ernest Gimson and the Arts & Crafts Movement exhibit in Leicester, November 8 2008 through March 1 2009.
James Mattson Coppercraft
James Mattson fell in love with the idea of making his own light fixtures when he saw a picture of a 1910 Limbert copper, mica and oak lamp. After building a similar lamp for himself, he learned the fundamentals of etching copper from an ancient Popular Mechanics article, and kept at it until his hand was sure. Today, he makes absolutely beautiful chandeliers, table and floor lamps, lanterns and sconces, switchplates, and other bits and pieces (and a few larger-scale commissions) all of it in stunning etched copper, hand-made art glass, mica and oak, and all of it of his own design.
stuff I like: bell & turn plate, 1891 patent
For the bargain price of $275, this antique doorbell set can be yours. One in stock, available from Rejuvenation Hardware in Portland, Oregon; $22 shipping to the rest of the US.
I saw several similar in Nova Scotia where they are quite popular; they were all painted black, though.
Jay Curtis: “ArtGlass & Metal” in the Arts & Crafts tradition
Jay Curtis is a craftsman specializing in etched glass and metal, and his techniques include "water-jet cutting, hand painting, airbrushing, leading, beveling and glue-chipping." His work ranges from the whimsical to the elegant, and much of it is very strongly influenced by the floral designs of the Arts & Crafts Movement.One recent line of products includes etched "special occasion" bowls, available for sale through the website.
Photos of Jay’s more Arts & Crafts-influenced work are up in our art glass album on Flickr.
Eleek – metal casters in Portland, Oregon
David Surgan’s Heintz Collection
Brooklyn-based David Surgan collects and deals in Heintz metalware – the distinctive silver-on-bronze designs made by Otto Heintz’s Heintz Art Metal Shop in the late teens and early twenties. The striking Heintz motifs, on vases, bookends, bowls, lamps, desk sets and all sorts of other miscellany, are applied in silver on top of a base of bronze in a variety of colorful finishes – a green "verde" patina, a deep black called "royal," brown and blacks and deep, chocolatey, almost purplish browns. It is without a doubt some of the most detailed, original and beautiful metalware of the entire A&C period.
I had the opportunity to chat a bit with David at a show in 2005, and found him to be a warm, pleasant, funny guy who really loves what he sells and is eager to educate others. His advice is good and he’d be happy to talk to you about Heintz, should you have any questions; his new website is as much an educational resource as it is a catalog of his own stock. He exhibits at a number of shows, from the Asheville annual show & conference to the San Francisco show and plenty more on both coasts and in between. Drop on by and say hello, and consider investing in one of these especially beautiful and important pieces of American craft history.
Steve Lopes, Blacksmith
Steve Lopes is a Washington-based blacksmith focusing primarily on architectural metalwork. His portfolio includes extensive examples of his lighting, door hardware, and other work. One of the two home tours up on his web site shows off some really magnificent work in (and around) a modern Craftsman-style home in his area. The house, designed by Schuler Architecture and Roger Katz, two Seattle-based firms who are no strangers to modern Craftsman-inspired residential work, is a pretty amazing piece of work, integrating art glass, rough-hewn wood, soft Asian lifts, a huge volume of unpainted shingle, textile-block decorated concrete, some ingenious joinery and of course Lopes’ own carefully-wrought iron and other metalwork throughout.Practical Painting: the Pre-Raphaelites
Practical Painting showcases particular artistic techniques and movements in short illustrated essay form. This month, Denise includes a brief history of the Pre-Raphaelites, retrospectively considered part of the UK Craftsman Movement, although in fact they were more an influence upon William Morris and the still-forming Movement than part of it. Artists such as Burne Jones, DeMorgan, Waterhouse, Millais, Alma-Tadema, Rossetti, and Hunt were the central Pre-Raphaelites, and are all represented in the gallery that accompanies the article.pictured: Waterhouse’s Spring (The Flower Picker)
