Omega Workshops (1913-1919)
Omega Workshops
London; furniture designers and finishers (fl.1913-19)
Omega Workshops was registered as a company on 14 May 1913, with premises at 33 Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury. Its founder members were Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Wyndham Lewis and Frederick Etchells. None were furniture makers. The intention was to establish a workshop that would decorate furniture, as well as other decorative objects such as ceramics, metalwork, interior fittings etc., some of which were designed by them, and then provide a sales outlet for the work. The furniture was marked with the Greek letter Omega.
Roger Fry was the initiator and hands-on manager of the business; he had raised £1,300 by February 1913 from friends like Clive Bell, Bernard Shaw, Hugh Lane, Sir Ian and Lady Hamilton and Sir Kay Muir. Artists in the workshops were not allowed to work for more than 35 hours per week for Omega, for which they were paid 30s per week or 7s 6d per day, which allowed them time for ‘serious’ work of fine rather than decorative art. In addition to the founder members up to 20 other artists were sporadically employed by Omega. These initially included Cuthbert Hamilton, Sir Edward Wadsworth, Etchells’ sister Jessie, Henri Doucet, Jock Turnbull, Nina Hamnett and her husband Roald Kristian, also known as Edgar de Bergen. Some other painters like Gaudier Brzeska sold their work through the firm. Duncan Grant had already displayed a screen painted by him prior to the formation of Omega at the first Grafton Group exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery in March 1913. This screen or possibly another one (Anscombe(1981) pls II & XI), were shown at the Omega opening in July 1913. Two boxes painted by Grant for Omega and a screen painted with ‘Bathers in a Landscape’ by Vanessa Bell are illus. Anscombe (1981), pls III & 3. Three women from the Slade School of Art helped Fry to run Omega; Barbara Bagenal (nee Hiles), Gladys Hines and Winifred Gill. Mr Miles was the caretaker of the building and Charles Robinson started as the manager but was replaced by Gill and then Mr Paice. A retired house-painter, George Darling, was hired to prepare the surfaces of the furniture for painting and Ian Maxwell visited clients to measure up for furniture, fittings etc. until he went off to war.
Omega furniture was initially made by sub-contractors such as J. Kallenborn & Sons of Stanhope Street, London, and Dryad of Leicester. Kallenborn made marquetry tables, cupboards and trays whilst Dryad produced tall-backed chairs with cane seats and backs for decoration in the workshops. Examples of these chairs are at the V&A.

Omega chair designed by Roger Eliot Fry and made by Dryad, 1913-19 [MISC.2:3-1934]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Virginia Woolf in her biography of Fry stated that ‘He had to hunt out carpenters and upholsterers, little men in back streets who could be trusted to carry out designs and to make serviceable objects’. Collins (1983) believed that ‘the marquetried furniture made by Kallenborn constitutes some of the best of the Omega products’. The Omega catalogue gave lots of furniture suggestions, from a settee covered in black velvet for £12 12s, to screens, boxes, lamps, trays, toys and ladies dresses and accessories as well as soft furnishings and prices ranged from £1 10s for a painted table to £2 10s for a caned chair. Embroidery panels were generally designed by Duncan Grant and worked in needlepoint by Vanessa Bell and Mrs Miles, the caretaker’s wife.
Omega was commissioned to contribute a Post-Impressionist sitting room for the Ideal Home Exhibition, 9-25 October 1913, at Olympia, London. The room showed three chairs across the back wall, the only examples of the Omega/Dryad tall-backed chair with an extra circular headpiece, possibly designed to show the Omega symbol as a crowning feature (one example at the V&A)
An exhibition at Omega’s showrooms in Fitzroy Square followed the Ideal Home show, but by end of 1913 artistic and personality issues meant that Lewis, Etchells, Hamilton and Wadsworth were no longer associated with Omega. In February 1914 Omega furniture, textiles and pottery were shown at the Sandon Society in Liverpool and in the spring of that year Sir Ian and Lady Hamilton commissioned Omega for the interior of 1 Hyde Park Gardens. This work included marquetry and painted furniture. In particular, Omega supplied an outstanding curved writing desk with marquetry design of two birds on the top, a matching inlaid stool, a painted armchair for the small Chinese room on the first floor and several black velvet sofas piled high with hand-painted silk cushions in the ballroom and drawing room.
In May 1914 Omega exhibited 85 pieces at the Whitechapel Exhibition of Twentieth Century Art and in June Omega’s work was included in the Allied Arts Exhibition, Holland Park. Gaudier Brzeska, reviewing the latter exhibition in The Egoist admired the subtlety of a black and white carpet, marquetry tables and trays and the pottery, but was irritated by the ‘prettiness’ of the fabrics and hangings. A dressing table mirror, decorated by Vanessa Bell, of 1914 illus. Cooper (1987), no. 631; this same mirror was sold at Sotheby's, 3 May 1991 (lot 370).
Further private and commercial commissions for interior decoration and furnishing followed the show. One was for rugs, tables, vases, lampshades, murals and waitresses’ clothes for the Cadena Cafe in Westbourne Gove (Anscombe(1981), pl. 29). In November 1915 Omega carpets, furniture and pottery were included in an exhibition of Roger Fry’s art at the Alpine Club Gallery.
Grant and Bell left London in 1916 and although decoration commissions continued, business started to deteriorate. Later commissions including furniture were Arthur Ruck’s house at 4 Berkeley Street (inlaid tables) 1916-17 and Lalla Vandervelde’s flat in Rossetti Garden Mansions, Chelsea: a bed frame, a corner cupboard and two wardrobes, painted by Fry (of which two are illustrated below):

Bed designed by Roger Eliot Fry for Omega Workshops, 1915-16 [CIRC.270 to F-1975]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

A small painted corner cupboard designed by Roger Eliot Fry for Omega Workshops, 1915-16 [CIRC.273A/1-1975]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Omega exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 1916. By 1919 Fry and others started to use second-hand pieces, often purchased at auction, to decorate. In February 1919 Fry wrote to his mother ‘... I’m simply tired out with all the cares of the Omega... Then when Wolfe [Edward, the artist] got ill I had to do everything – all the furniture painting. I have surpassed myself in ingenuity inventing methods for treating this old and rough furniture without the long processes of getting a good surface, and also in designing things which could be carried out on the old rough paint, using where possible the original design or what was left of it. On an average, I think I must have designed and painted one piece of furniture per day...’.
The last Omega exhibition opened on 21 February 1919 and by the summer of 1919 the finances of the firm were precarious. Grant and Bell offered suggestions but the firm was wound up at a meeting on 20 June that year. The closing down sale was held 23 June – 9 July 1919 and the remaining stock was sold at half price. Pottery and ceramics remained available by order from Fry at his new home, 7 Dalmeny Avenue, London, whilst the closing down sale announcements indicated that ‘The artists connected with the Omega Workshops will continue to carry on business as house decorators’. David Garnett and Francis Birrell, of the Bloomsbury Group, opened a bookshop on Taviton Street furnished with tables bought from the sale. Speaking of Omega in 1976, Duncan Grant said that ‘It was rather like a party, with all the gaps too. One was often on one’s own. And then the crowds would come in and own one. It was tremendously encouraging. I think it was the best period of my life’.
In 1929 Grant & Bell were employed by Lady Dorothy Wellesley to decorate and furnish the dining room of her house, Penns-in-the-Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent. An ocatagonal table was designed for the centre of the room and matched to a set of 8 chairs made to the design of around 1913 by Roger Fry; the chairs were offered for sale by Sotheby's, London, 30 October 1998 (lot 828). The dining furniture was all made by J. Kallenborn & Sons.
Examples of Omega marquetry furniture designed by Fry and Grant are illus. Collins(1984), pls. VI, VII, 15 & 16. The V&A collections of Omega furniture also include the Lily Pond table, designed by Fry and probably painted by Grant and an inlaid dressing table. Other examples can be viewed by clicking links below:
- Box and lid, wood, with painted surface representing a goldfish in a pond and the omega symbol, by Duncan Grant, 1913-14
- Cube shaped box, painted softwood, Wyndham Lewis, c. 1914
- Lamp stand painted with geometric decoration, 1913-19
- Lamp stand painted with geometric decoration, 1913-19

Design by Roger Fry a marquetry and lacquer cabinet with giraffe designs for the Omega Workshop. London, c. 1913 [E.733-1955]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Sources: 'The 1930 Look: A Room Decorated by Duncan Grant & Vanessa Bell, The Studio, August 1930; Agius, British Furniture 1800-1915 (1978); Cooper, Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors (1978); Anscombe, Omega and After (1981); Collins, The Omega Workshops (1984).
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