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Art Furniture Company (1867-1868)

Art Furniture Company

25 Garrick Street, London; art furniture makers/retailers (fl.1867-68)

An architectural interior design partnership at 25 Garrick Street which, according to the Illustrated London News, 17 June 1867, was ‘prepared to supply at ordinary trade prices, domestic furniture of an artistic and picturesque character, designs by C L Eastlake, A W Blomfield, and [E] W Godwin and other architects’. Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste of 1868 featured a cabinet designed by him and exhibited by Heaton, Butler & Bayne but probably made by the Art Furniture Co. Godwin designed 16 pieces of furniture for the firm in Japanese and Gothic Revival styles. His Anglo-Japanese buffet (illus. Soros (1999), CR 304-a) was executed by them as were some of his Gothic revival chairs for Dromore, including the eagle chair (Soros (1999), CR 114). The firm’s work was illustrated in the Building News (24 December 1868) in a feature on the furniture designed by architects Walford and Donkin, which showed items with ebonized timbers, fretwork and stencilling.

The business proved to be a commercial failure and closed in 1868 although The Building News, 29 December 1871, illustrated Godwin's design of The Florence Cabinet, dated 1867, for the Art Furniture Company (Edwards, (2022), p. 22). 

Sources: Gere & Whiteway, Nineteenth-Century Design.  From Pugin to Mackintosh (1993); Stapleton, ‘John Moyr Smith 1839-1912’, The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present (1996); Soros, The Secular Furniture of E W Godwin (1999); Edwards, ‘Art Furniture in the Old English Style.  The Firm of Collinson and Lock, London, 1870-1900’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (Fall-Winter 2012); Edwards, Collinson & Lock (2022).