Chair of the Month for September is this scroll back Windsor armchair.
The type of 3 ring turning on the leg dates it to about 1870-1900. At some point in its history, it was painted white, and then later stripped. Traces of the white paint remain.
In the collection at Wycombe Museum there are even more wonderful chairs than we are able to display at any one time. This chair, together with many others in Wycombe Museum’s collection has been stored in poor environmental conditions which resulted in a small proportion of chairs developing surface mould growth.
We are grateful to have received grant funding from the Regional Furniture Society, Heart of Bucks, and additional support from Buckinghamshire Council. This means that our stored collection has now been removed from the damp stores, slowly dried, and cleaned. Our fabulous chairs and the rest of our stored collection continues to be preserved for future generations to enjoy!
Watch this space for news on our planned new chair store which will be open to visitors to explore.
N.B. The Museum is closed on the Monday of the Reception: when you attend please enter by the Hoxton Station Entrance.
Members of the Regional Furniture Society and Furniture History Society are invited to a celebratory reception in honour of the 50 years Bill and Gerry Cotton have devoted to Regional Furniture Studies.
Just over 50 years ago, Bill Cotton was drawn to the possibility that country furniture could be defined by regional characteristics influenced by geography, materials, trade, rural customs and traditional ways of life. He and Gerry started collecting chairs with makers’ stamps and brands which they referenced to trade directories, census returns and newspaper archives to establish provenance. And so began a lifetime project to identify the makers and define the regional distinctions of furniture made across the British Isles.
This reception at the Museum of Home will be a moment to reflect on their achievement and acknowledge the significance of the Cotton Chair Collection and Archive they have donated to the museum, and the massive indexes of English regional furniture makers now being added to BIFMO.
There will be short tributes led by Liz Hancock and Simon Swynfen Jervis at 2.30pm.
There is no charge for this event, but you are required to register. Places are limited and will be allocated first come, first served. To register please email your details to: events.rfs@gmail.com
Chair of the Month for August is this upholstered ‘Toledo’ Chair made by Parker Knoll in about 1951.
Unusually, it has a metal frame which has been made to look like wood. This was because of because of timber shortages following the Second World War.
Parker Knoll were formed when Frederick Parker, who had been making furniture since 1898, went into partnership with Willi Knoll in 1929. Parker had been one of the first High Wycombe factories to make upholstered furniture. Knoll had invented a new form of sprung furniture with a coiled steel wire on both the seat and the back. Parker Knoll quickly became a household name. Production moved out of High Wycombe in the 1990s.
You can see this chair in Wycombe Museum’s newly refurbished chair galleries, which are now fully open.
Chair of the Month for July is a Windsor armchair, made by William Birch in about 1904.
This unusually decorative Windsor chair is made from mahogany, an imported timber not usually used in the High Wycombe furniture industry. It was made for the St Louis World’s Fair, in Missouri, United States. The Fair was held in 1904 and showed products from over 60 countries. Nearly 19.7 million people attended.
William Birch traded from about the 1840s or ‘50s until 1954. In 1901 they opened a new, large modern factory in Leigh Street on the west side of High Wycombe. Birch were taken over by E Gomme in 1954, who were ready to expand after launching their successful G-Plan range.
You can see this chair in Wycombe Museum’s newly refurbished chair galleries, which are now fully open.
Chair of the Month is a partnership between Wycombe Museum and the Regional Furniture Society.
Chair of the month for June is the AD Chair by Tom Rawlings, for William Hands, oak with upholstered seat. Designed in 2016 and first made in 2017, this chair retails as the ‘Broadway Chair. A range of different heights were introduced in 2018 to extend the range.
This chair has been loaned by William Hands to our temporary exhibition ‘The Art of the Chair’, which can be seen until 2 Feb 2025.
Wycombe Museum is working with local furniture producers and other partners on the Chilterns Chairs Festival. The festival takes place throughout July with events and family fun to celebrate the unique chairmaking heritage of Wycombe and the local area. Visit Wycombe Museum’s website for more information www.wycombemuseum.org.uk. The Chilterns Chairs Festival is being organised by Wycombe Museum and is funded by the Chalk, Cherries & Chairs Landscape Partnership. CCC is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and is hosted by the Chilterns National Landscape.
Chair of the Month is a partnership between Wycombe Museum and the Regional Furniture Society.
The agenda for 30 June 2024 is to be found here. The Minutes of the 2023 AGM are here. The Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 December 2023 are here.
This year we are again going to offer the possibility of joining the AGM by Zoom.
The Annual General Meeting of the Regional Furniture Society will be held at the University of Kent, Canterbury in the Rutherford College Building and via Zoom on Sunday 30 June at 9:00 a.m.
The Agenda, the Minutes of the AGM held in 2023 and the Annual Report & Accounts for 2023 will be posted on the website in the next few days, as well as being available at the Conference/AGM on 30 June.
Members who wish to take part in the AGM via Zoom should email the Secretary on: justj2r2@gmail.com
The Secretary will then forward to those members the access code for the Zoom meeting, the Agenda, the Minutes of the AGM held in 2023, and the Annual Report & Accounts for 2023. This will be done a week before the meeting.
The Annual Report and Accounts for 2023 can also be sent to any member requiring a paper version. They should contact the Secretary to request a copy and should send an A4 self-addressed envelope.
Scottish Furniture, 1500-1914, about to be published by National Museums Scotland is the first comprehensive narrative account of furniture-making in Scotland. In this lecture, the book’s author, Stephen Jackson, will guide us through the evolving landscape of Scottish furniture-making with particular reference to national and regional characteristics.
Based in Edinburgh, Stephen is editor of the Regional Furniture Society’s annual journal. Graduating from Cambridge in 1993, his career with furniture started in London at the Geffrye Museum, now the Museum of the Home. He wrote a MPhil with David Jones at St Andrews before becoming a curator at Middlesex University and then at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He joined National Museums Scotland in 1999 and the new book is the culmination of many years of research during which he travelled extensively to study furniture in the wild.
To attend this on-line talk, please apply to the RFS Events organiser by 15th June at events.rfs@gmail.com. You will then be sent a link shortly before the event.
This visit is an exclusive RFS event, whilst the previously listed Symposium is not.
We will meet for coffee in the café of the Parkinson Building, where Mark Westgarth, Associate Professor in Art History & Museum Studies at the University, will talk to us about the library of mainly British furniture books and manuscripts dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, created by the antiques dealer John Victor Bedford (1941-2019) and gifted to the University of Leeds. Mark is lead curator of the exhibition, which runs until 21 December 2024.
We then travel by public transport to Temple Newsam Museum, which has a cafe for lunching. Adam Toole, Curator of and Furniture and Decorative Art will show us some of the vernacular furniture acquired by Christopher Gilbert, the museum curator and founding member of the RFS who was based at Temple Newsam for his entire working life. The day finishes at 16:30
Cost of the day £10, (refreshments not included) A booking form is available to print from here.
Members may be interested in the following offering from the Furniture History Society and BIFMO:
Join us online every Tuesday throughout June, when curators and historians will consider the evolution and variety of country house interiors in Britain and Ireland created between 1780 and 1950, with an emphasis on furniture makers and designers. Each of the four sessions will deal with a different stylistic phase and will be introduced by either Dr Megan Aldrich (sessions 1-3) or Elisabeth Bogdan (session 4). Every week the introduction will be followed by two experts who will provide case studies on specific country houses, ranging from Castletown House in Co. Kildare to Castle Drogo in Devon. There will also be short Q&A sessions.
Here is an overview of the course programme:
Session 1 – 4th June
Title: Reconsidering the Antique: later neoclassical interiors
Speakers: Dr Megan Aldrich, Dr Kyle Leyden & James Collett-White
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Session 2 – 11th June
Title: Opulence and Excellence in Regency Interiors
Speakers: Dr Megan Aldrich, Dr Alexandra Loske & Adriana Turpin
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Session 3 – 18th June
Title: The Arts and Crafts Country Houses: Alternative Interpretations of the Past
Speakers: Dr Megan Aldrich, Jessica Insley & Annette Carruthers
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Session 4 – 25th June
Title: The Country House in the Twentieth Century
Speakers: Elisabeth Bogdan, Katherine Sharp & Professor Pat Kirkham.
Tickets may be bought for individual sessions or for the entire course, but you will benefit from a discount if all 4 sessions are bought together. Don’t worry if you cannot attend the sessions live because they will be recorded and links to the recording will be sent to ticketholders. These recordings will not be available to purchase after the course has ended. FHS members and ECD members will receive a discount on all tickets.
For further information and to purchase tickets please click here to travel straight to the relevant Eventbrite page. If you have any questions, please contact Ann Davies at bifmo@furniturehistorysociety.org.
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