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£4 Million Restoration: Historic House Rescue

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OZbXXL4QE4

Tomorrow, Wednesday 16th January at 9pm, More 4 is broadcasting  the first of two programmes called the £4 Million Restoration, which may be of interest to members. It documents the restoration of a Landmark Trust farmhouse in the Black Mountains, dating from c 1400. A new dating technique has been used which is claimed to work on timber previously undateable by conventional methods.

Further information is available in this article in The Guardian: newspaper: Welsh farmstead is rare medieval hall house, experts confirm and the programme details can be found here: Historic House Rescue.

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Spring 2019 Newsletter

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The Spring 2019 edition (No.70) of the RFS Newsletter is now available to members. It features reports of recent Society events and a number of  illustrated articles on regional furniture:cover rfs newsletter spring 2019

  • Letter from America – Daniel Ackermann
  • An unrecorded medieval chest at St Mary’s church, Horsham – Chris Pickvance
  • Medieval chests in Kent – Chris Pickvance
  • The Landkey Parish Table purchased by the Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon – Alison Mills
  • Joseph Newton’s Windsor chair advertisements, 1725 and 1729 – Julian Parker
  • Windsor chairs at Newstead Abbey – Julian Parker
  • John Bray of Bourne, Lincolnshire, Windsor chair-maker – William Sergeant and Julian Parker
  • The myth of the patinated Windsor chair – Bob Parrott
  • A caned library chair by John Syers at Broughton Hall, North Yorkshire – Brian Crossley
  • A little wider please: a barber-surgeon’s chair – Jeremy Bate
  • Fashionable furniture in Haverfordwest: a card table by William Owen – Sarah Medlam
  • Unlocking the Geffrye – Emma Hardy

Additional reports:

  • Lawrence Neal, chair-maker: when is a chair more than a chair?
  • Sitting Firm
  • The rush-seated chair: a celebration of past, present and future
  • V&A Dundee: The Scottish Design Galleries

The Newsletter is published twice a year, and is one of the benefits of RFS membership. A full list of articles in previous editions can be found here: Newsletter research articles

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Volunteer Opportunity at V&A

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We have had the following request from the Department of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the V&A. Please respond directly to the email or phone number given below rather than to the RFS.

Would any member be interested in volunteering to help maintain the library and research files in the Furniture and Woodwork section at the V&A?  We need help rationalising our research papers, and accessioning and auditing existing books.  If you live in the London area and would be interested in offering time on a regular basis, please contact Kate Hay, Department of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion, k.hay@vam.ac.uk or 0207 942 2292.

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Autumn 2018 Newsletter

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RFS NL 69 Berkely cover
The latest RFS Newsletter out now and available to members. There are several interesting notes in this Autumn edition:

  • Letter from America by Daniel Ackermann
  • A Forest chair in Colonial America by Bob Parrott
  • Darvel chairs: J. McKellar, a new maker by Crissie White
  • 16th-century panelling and a canopy from the Neptune Inn, Ipswich by Liz Hancock

The Newsletter  includes two additional notes by curators discussing objects in their collections:

  • The Guardian’s chair from Leah Mellors of the Ripon Museum Trust and
  • A Warwickshire Press Cupboard, by Rosalyn Sklar at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

There are also reports on recent events, featuring the February meeting at the V&A on New thinking about 16th-century furniture, with summaries of the papers by Chris Pickvance, Megan Wheeler, Michael Pearce, Nick Humphrey and Yannick Chastang. Notes on the Glasgow conference on Charles Rennie Mackintosh include a summary of this year’s Christopher Gilbert Memorial Lecture by David Jones on Scottish vernacular sources for Mackintosh’s furniture designs.

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The Accomplished Lady by Noël Riley

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Acc Ldy leaflet-3 copy.

Another wonderful publication was released last year by one of the Society’s members and former Newsletter editor, Noël Riley.  The Accomplished Lady – a history of genteel
pursuits c. 1660–1860 is a richly illustrated “study of the skills and pastimes of upper-class women and the works they produced during a 200-year period.”

Noël Riley has written and lectured extensively on the decorative arts and is a
consultant at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Her previous books include Penwork: A Decorative Art, The Victorian Design Source Book, Gifts for Good Children – the History of Children’s China 1790–1890, and pocket guides to Tea Caddies and Visiting Card Cases. She has written for many art periodicals, both academic and popular, and for many years she contributed to Historic House, the journal of the Historic Houses Association.

The book is, of course, available in all good book shops!

For more in formation see here, The Accomplished Lady – leaflet, and the review in the RFS Spring Newsletter 2018.

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Spring Newsletter 2018

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Members will by now have received their copy of the latest RFS Newsletter, featuring reports of recent Society events as well as a number of short illustrated articles and queries on regional furniture. The Newsletter is published twice a year, and is one of the benefits of RFS membership.

NL Spring 2018 coverThe copy date for the next Newsletter is 31 July 2018. Please send MS Word files (without embedded images) and separate high-resolution images (jpegs or tiffs), preferably by email, to liz.hancock@glasgow.ac.uk.

 

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16th century furniture in the Burrell Collection

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The Burrell Furniture Collection

Selection of furniture in the Burrell Collections, now available online via the Glasgow Museums collections navigator

At the Research in Progress meeting at the V&A on 24 February 2018, curators Rachel King and Laura Bauld gave a short presentation on the important collection of 16th century furniture in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums, which has around 400 pieces dating to the period before 1685.

The Burrell Collection has a very full and fine selection of early, mostly English, oak furniture. It is both religious and domestic in origin, ranging from choirstalls, to chairs, tables, beds, hutches and court cupboards. These vary in style, from simple to elaborate, and though some are inlaid, few are painted or gilded, with one spectacular exception being the ceremonial bedhead with erotic carved decoration made to celebrate the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII to Anne of Cleves in January 1539/40. The collection  also takes in architectural embellishment in wood, such as screens, panelling – including a complete room from Harrington Hall, Lincolnshire – doors, fire surrounds and screens, and an elaborate ceiling from Bridgwater in Somerset.

While the Burrell Collection is currently closed for refurbishment until 2020, much of the collection is accessible online in the new Glasgow Museums database. Full instructions for using the database are available here.

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2017 Regional Furniture Journal

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Cover 2017 crop

Happy New Year from the RFS!

A quick reminder that volume 31, the 2017 edition, of the Regional Furniture Journal is currently available to all members.

In keeping with our policy of providing free and open access to back issues, the 2015 Journal is now available online here, on our Journal web page.

 

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British and Irish Furniture Makers Online

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Readers will be interested to hear about this fascinating new project –  British and Irish Furniture Makers Online (BIFMO). The project is a collaboration between the Furniture History Society and the Institute of Historical Research with the goal of developing and making accessible the history of furniture as a material, cultural, social and economic subject of study.

From the press release:

Conversation piece, a cabinet maker’s office. Oil Painting, England, c. 1770 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Image No. 2006BF4151-01).

The Institute of Historical Research and the Furniture History Society are delighted to announce that British and Irish Furniture Makers Online  is now freely available to view online at https://bifmo.data.history.ac.uk.

The initial phase of the project has seen the construction of the BIFMO database comprising information on English furniture makers drawn from the definitive 1986 guide to the trade, the Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, 1660 – 1840, as well as from the London Joiners’ Company apprenticeship and freedom records, 1640-1720.

The database will contain detailed biographies of British and Irish furniture makers from the sixteenth century to the present day, providing a rich resource for historians of social, economic, political, art, furniture and material culture, as well as to collectors, connoisseurs and the art market. In addition to extending the chronological dates of the database’s biographical data, our aim is to broaden the contents of BIFMO to visual materials, as well as the reproduction of a wide range of primary sources.

The second phase of the project is undertaking new research to explore key historical questions surrounding the furniture making industry, including a case study on the role of British and Irish women in the nineteenth century: where they lived, their occupational roles, how they sold their wares, and their clientele. In addition, ongoing development to the BIFMO website will introduce new ways of engaging with the data as we enhance the information in the Dictionary with new scholarship published since 1986.

BIFMO is an ongoing project, with separate but integrated research, resource-creation, public engagement and training strands. If you would like more information about the project, or the database, or getting involved, please do get in touch: http://bifmo.data.history.ac.uk/contact

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Journal back issues (II)

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Given the longstanding storage problems of back issues of the journal, and bearing in mind that all journals up to the year 2009 have now been digitized (with 2010 to 2014 to be added shortly), it was decided at the last Council meeting that the bulk of all back issues up to the year 2009 should be destroyed. A working stock of the more recent editions will be retained for sale. If any member would like old copies of the Journal up to 2009, please contact Jenny Cowking at publications.rfs@gmail.com before the end of October.