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Campbell, Smith & Company; Campbell, Charles (1873-1889)

Campbell, Smith & Company; Campbell, Charles

London; decorators of interiors & furniture and artistic furniture makers (fl.1873-1889)

The firm was founded by Charles Campbell in partnership with Frederick George Smith after Campbell left Harland & Fisher.

They were retained by William Burges to paint and gild some furniture designed by him and this led to extensive decorative work at Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch for the Marquess of Bute under Burges’s direction. Much of the painted furniture and decoration at Burges’s home, Tower House in Melbury Road, Kensington, was carried out by the firm, possibly including the red bedstead (now at the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford). The design for the 'Lord Bute' bedstead at Clock Tower, Cardiff Castle which is loosely based on Burges' own bedstead, is still at Cardiff and the bed itself, completed c. 1874, was sold at Christie's, 3 November 1999 (lot 45).    

A succession of church and theatre decorating commissions followed including the New Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue in 1889 [The Furniture Gazette, 1 January 1889].

C. Campbell was recorded in The Furniture Gazette Directory, 1877 andCampbell, Smith & Co. in The Furniture Gazette: Classified List of the Furniture, Upholstery and Allied Trades, 1886, as Art Furniture Manufacturers and Merchants at 85 Southampton Row, Russell Square. The London Post Office Trades Directory (1891) listed the firm at 75 & 78 Newman Street and the same Directory (1902) recorded Campbell, Smith & Co. Ltd at 75 Newman Street, with works at Hythe Road, Willesden Junction. 

Source: Gere & Whiteway, Nineteenth-Century Design. From Pugin to Mackintosh (1993).