Ernest Gimson, furniture designer, teacher and architect, was described by the art critic Nikolaus Pevsner in his influential study, The Pioneers of Modern Design (1949) as "the greatest of the English architect-designers". Today his reputation is securely established as one of the most influential designers of the English Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular the genius behind the Cotswold school in furniture and design.

Early career

Ernest William Gimson was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, in 1864. He was a generation younger than William Morris, the son of Josiah Gimson, a successful engineer and owner of the Vulcan Works in Leicester. When he was 20, Morris stayed as a guest of the Gimsons, to give a lecture on ‘Art and Socialism’ at the Leicester Secular Society, an event which changed the course of his life.

Morris's insistance that the way to reform of the arts and society itself lay through a handicraft system for the production of furniture, textiles, ceramics, wallpaper, printed books, above all for building itself, “made the profoundest impression on Gimson”, according to the Arts and Crafts theorist, William Lethaby.

Ernest Gimson at Sapperton

Morris recommended Gimson to the architectural practice of John Dando Sedding (1838-1891), an ecclesiastical architect in London at whose studio many of the leading designers had trained. Sedding had been, like Morris and Webb, a pupil of G.E. Street, a lover of the textures of simple barns and rural buildings, who went on to run his own stimulating office next door to Morris & Co. in Oxford Street. In 1876 Sedding met Ruskin, under whose influence he developed a freer Gothic, introducing natural ornament in his designs. Ruskin exhorted him:

Modern so-called architects are merely employers of workmen on commissions and if you would be a real architect, you must always have either pencil or chisel in your own hand.

Sedding studied and practised stone carving and iron work himself and, in the 1880s, was preaching here urgent and practical reform, based on living and reviving craft skills. Hermann Muthsesius realized that "he formed the first bridge between the architects' camp and that of handicraft proper". We see a 'fresh lif'e', as Sedding put it himself, a freedom of style and a naturalism of decoration from which he generates his modern 'crafted Gothic', with its hybrid of late Gothic forms and Arts and Crafts detail. His love of handicrafts is demonstrated profusely in sketchbooks, and simple carved naturalistic detail, as seen in his Devon churches at Hoberton and Ermington: based on leaves, flowers, animals and birds. Always we see the close involvement of the architect in the simple craft processes of building:

the real architect ... must be his own clerk of works, his own carver... the familiar spirit of the structure as it rises from the ground.

Lethaby wrote of him:

his originality arose in stimulating himself by a study of old work considered not as mere forms, facts, and dates, but as ideas, as humanity, as delight.

From Sedding, Gimson derived his interest in craft techniques, the stress on textures and surfaces, the naturalistic detail of flowers, leaves and animals, always drawn from life, and the close involvement of the architect in the simple processes of building and in the supervision of a team of craftsmen, employed direct. Ernest Gimson taught a "cleaner" and more committed honesty; the direct practice of craft skills, preferably in an organic village community of the type later described by George Sturt. There was no pretence of 'stylism': "solid realities ... not names and dreams" were his aims.

Gimson soon studied the crafts of traditional chairmaking and modelled plasterwork, as well as architecture and furniture design, visiting the master exponents of the crafts and learning their techniques at first hand. In 1889 he joined Morris's Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). In 1890, he was a founder member of the short-lived furniture company, Kenton and Co., with Sidney Barnsley, Alfred Powell, W.R. Lethaby, Mervyn Macartney, Col. Mallet and Reginald Blomfield. Here they acted as designers rather than craftsmen and explored inventive ways of articulating traditional crafts, "the common facts of traditional building", as Philip Webb, "their particular prophet", had taught.

The Gimson group at Pinbury Park, Sapperton, Gloucestershire, c. 1896

Sidney Barnsley, Lucy Morley, Ernest Gimson (seated), Alice and her husband Ernest Barnsley, and their two daughers, Mary, who married Norman Jewson, and Ethel

The White House, sketch by Gimson (Owlpen collection)

Stoneywell Cottage, near Leicester

At Stoneywell Cottage outside Leicester (1898), he uses broken horizontal plains, rejecting altogether the flat datum, as levels vary with the grades of the site, 'cultivating' it with terraces and steps, different ceiling heights, with an emphasis on eaves and offsets, the weathering of chimney stacks, the use of abstract surfaces, materials contrasting the structural elements, such as the soft thatch of the roof with the rough lime-washed rubble of a wall, carefully battered.

There is an urge towards the organic, building houses in the folds of the earth so that they seem autochthonous, to grow by accretion into nature and out of it, to melt into their surroundings. Here we see him developing the organic possibilities of architecture, which in different materials and with a different aesthetic was being developed by Modernists, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, or on the Continent by the Art Nouveau: Antoni Gaudi, Hugo Harin and Hans Scharoun.

In his interiors, too, we begin to see the reductive lines and simplified surfaces of Modernism emerging. Alfred Powell describes his living room at Pinbury (right):

The room was large, and the floor flagged with white stone, the walls and ceiling, beams and joists white. A large black dresser, hung with gay and well-used crockery, a large settle at the fireside … and other rush-bottom chairs made by himself on his pole lathe, were its furniture.

These are not the clean boxes of the modern movement. Gimson accomplished a study in elimination more radical than Godwin in his Japanese house in his rejection of the confused and the trivial -- a conscious asceticism and a zeal for truth. Rooms are uncluttered, "austerely beautiful" (Norman Jewson wrote), to an extent which became a revelation to contemporaries and visitors (like Gerald Brenan). Their adornment lay in the decoration of the plaster surface of the wall itself, the play of light and shadows in soft relief, tactile and textured. We cannot imagine a Gimson interior with wallpaper. A few pieces of furniture are placed in a contrived and pleasing way, with an emphasis on useful but beautiful forms, traditional, timeless: fire irons, settles, dressers, chests.

Gimson's living room, showing settle and table now at Owlpen

In his furniture, Gimson retains the logical construction of his buildings. The furniture of this Cotswold School is analogous, a form of rational building in miniature, both as to constructional details and decoration. It observes the Ruskinian precept of architecture, "confessing the way it is made", its ambition the ornament of a structural anatomy, more delicate, like a flower exposing its genitals, with its surface textures elaborated with care and emotion, and apparent craftsmanship. Van de Velde had overstated when he praised new English furniture for "systematic discarding of ornament".

We find Gimson rediscovering external skeletons, creating this discourse between structure and cladding,  a syntax in which the form is embodied in the revealed ligaments binding together the construction, celebrated in its jointing, for example; dovetails, exposed fox tenons, wedge tenons. But the decoration is not purely technical, for it is more than the simple revelation of a constructional framework. There is a delight in the virtuoso inscapes achieved by the joiner or the village smith in his articulation of a tradition. Under his supervision, the details of functionality are codified, and raised to an art form. And there is over-engineering, the functionally adequate form may be adapted to give more vivid expression to its function, distilling this play, this tension, this touch, between material, craftsmanship and aesthetic gravity, to present a poetic rather than a facade.

The forms -- of his ash-turned chairs, the Spanish vargueno, the William and Mary cabinet -- are rooted in historical prototypes, but reinterpreted in their translation, never a reproduction. The local agricultural dialect is specific in hayrake stretchers, whose 'shaving', or chamfering, so well described by George Strut, another prophet of the organic community, forms curious patterns of faceting. Some of this became mannered and hackneyed in the hands of imitators, but in Gimson's work the observation which "makes it new", in Ezra Pound's phrase, is that of a master craftsman: fresh, inventive, playful.

In the finest work increasingly demanded by his patrons, his 'state furniture' for formal rooms, the elaboration of the structural is not always a sufficient ornament. Gimson delves into tradition to come back with exhibitions of stringing in macassar ebony and holly; wood treated with pickles and stains to bring out grain; there is studied handling of the timber surface, emphasis on the figuring of quartered Birdlip oak and English walnut; forged ironwork; simple decoration in gougework; lines which are bowed and curved and canted; open-work rails derived from wagons; multi fielded panels, often raised with octagons.

Gimson chest

Gimson caskets and church furnishings, reduced in scale, focus the eclectic intensity, with their floral inlays, boldly executed in mother-of-pearl or bone or silver, in intarsia and marquetry, in a distillation from many sources: we find him studying and adapting a Gujarati cabinet, Venetian work, Lombardic-Byzantine Cosmati work, Portuguese-Indian work; or translating, as truth to materials demanded, a seventeenth-century needlework design, mediated by his own observation of nature in the Sapperton valley.

Gimson's furniture, as his contemporaries recognised, is the best known and most original part of his oeuvre, with lasting cross-cultural references; now often icons, contradicting his aesthetic of usefulness, as museum pieces. But his wider work expresses concerns consonant with subsequent twentieth-century development. Critics may challenge the backward-looking vernacular of the Cotswold Arts and Crafts with its stress on pre-industrial architectonic forms, processes and technology, causing it to dismissed as another blind alley of nostalgic historicism, which repudiated the international energies of modernism, its new materials and clean surfaces and engineering structures, in favour of improving on tried and tested methods, deepening them, honouring them to bring out their peculiar beauty.

Today his furniture and craft work is regarded as a supreme achievement of its period and is well represented in the principal collections of the decorative arts in Britain and the United States of America. Specialist collections of his work may be seen in England at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, and in the Cotswolds at the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery, Rodmarton Manor and Owlpen Manor.

Modelled plasterwork is another craft where Gimson excels, described on a separate webpage. It expresses tactile concerns, inscribing the surface of his architecture with its regional character, where the light plays across modelled surfaces to guarantee a place-conscious aesthetic in an intertextuality of art and light, culture and nature; its stress on surface patterning and relief subtly defying the perspectival plane and the terms by which we interpret architectural space. These simple, tactile reliefs invite a search, exploring, penetrating even, the scenographic veil over the surface of buildings with their capacity to arouse the instinct to touch, returning the observer, as in his furniture, to the poetics of construction. The tactile and the tectonic are vitally interfused.

Gimson died aged 54 in 1919. As Sir George Trevelyan hypothesised, it was just as he was achieving widespread recognition and when his creative inspiration was at its highest: "There is no knowing how great his influence on the Modern Movement might have been". Gimson's wider influence beyond the small coterie of Sapperton craftsmen is harder to assess, even controversial.

Norman Jewson was his foremost student, who carried his design principles into the next generation and described his studio practices in his classic memoir By Chance I did Rove (1951).

Title page to Gimson memorial volume,

prepared by his friends after his death

Bookplate for Sydney Gimson