Earnest Gimson (1864 - 1919) and the Barnsley Brothers
Title
Subject
1. Gimson and the Barnsley brothers and their workers. The back row includes Fred Orton (second from left) and Barnsley (sitting in the centre). The middle row includes Fred Gardiner (left) and Ernest Gimson (far right).
2. Earnest Gimson
3. Sidney Barnsley
4. Norman Jewson's wedding to Mary Barnsley at Duntisbourne Rous; his father-in-law, Ernest Barnsley, is to the right
5. The Workshop at Pinbury, 1903. Plaster lath and chair parts in background. Parts of an oak coffer by S.H.B. central and part of an inlaid coffer by A.E.B., left foreground. Parts of Gimson chair in right foreground. Many of these tools were still in use by E.B. in 1972.
Description
Ernest William Gimson (pronounced 'Jimson') was an English furniture designer and architect. Gimson was described by the art critic Nikolaus Pevsner as "the greatest of the English architect-designers" and was as one of the most influential designers of the English Arts and Crafts movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Gimson, with the Barnsley brothers, set up a highly influential and productive Arts and Crafts workshop near Sapperton where, amongst others, locals such as Fred Orton and Fred Gardiner trained and then became Arts and Crafts 'names' in their own right.
Overview
Ernest Gimson was born in Leicester in 1864. At 19, he attended a lecture on 'Art and Socialism' at the Leicester Secular Society given by the leader of the Arts and Crafts revival in Victorian England, William Morris, and was greatly inspired - this was to change his life.
Two years later, aged 21, Gimson had both architectural experience and a first class result from classes at Leicester School of Art. He moved to London to gain wider experience, and William Morris wrote him letters of recommendation which he used to obtain employment at Sedding's Studio. There he met Ernest Barnsley, and through him, Sidney Barnsley, a friendship that was to last the rest of his life.
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 Hoare 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. Gimson had also, through the Art Workers' Guild, become interested in a more hands on approach to traditional crafts, and in 1890 spent time with Philip Clissett in Bosbury, Herefordshire, learning to make rush-seated ladderback chairs. He also began experimenting with plasterwork.
Gimson and the Barnsley brothers moved "to live near to nature" at Pinbury Park, near Sapperton under the patronage of the Bathurst family. In 1900, he set up a small furniture workshop in Cirencester, moving to larger workshops at Daneway House, a small medieval manor house at Sapperton, where he stayed until his death in 1919. He strove to invigorate the local rural community (including Oakridge area) and, encouraged by his success, planned to found a Utopian craft village. He concentrated on designing furniture, made by craftsmen, under his chief cabinet-maker, Peter van der Waals, whom he engaged in 1901.
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).
Today his furniture and craft work are 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 New Walk Museum, Leicester, and in Gloucestershire at the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Rodmarton Manor and Owlpen Manor.
The Sapperton workshop was closed after Gimson's death, but many of the craftsmen went with Peter van der Waals to his new premises in Chalford.
Gimson's Circle and Oakridge
Ernest Gimson was the most influential of the young architect designers who came to settle in this area. His designs continued to be used long after his death in 1919, both by the architect Norman Jewson and the local blacksmiths, Alfred and Norman Bucknell. Norman Bucknell, now aged 94, still remembers Gimson and his workshops. Most of his work was based on original Gimson designs but even in his own work he has tried to retain the Gimson style. This he defines as intricate detail work, needing not only great skill but considerable artistry. The object must be useful too. 'If a thing isn't functional it isn't worth doing', he said in an interview in 1975.
Gimson was born in Leicester in 1864, the son of a wealthy manufacturer. He decided to become an architect at a time when the career offered considerable opportunities for creative achievement. An Arts and Crafts architect might be commissioned to design every detail of the house, right down to door hinges and window catches. William Morris arranged for him to become a pupil with an architect he knew in London, John Sedding. There he met Ernest Barnsley, Detmar Blow and Alfred Powell who were all to become life-long friends and key figures themselves in the Arts and Crafts Movement.
After travelling on the continent, drawing and photographing old houses, churches and cathedrals, Gimson found he was drawn more and more to 'common and modest buildings' in England. He loved the simple thatched cottage, the timber-framed farmhouse and the tall, stone, gabled manor. This passion for old buildings was to inspire and inform his work as an architect.
The Call of the Cotswolds
'The town invaded the country; but the invaders vielded to the influence of their surroundings and became country people.' William Morris
By now Gimson was eager to leave London with its smog and crowded, noisy streets. He wanted to live in the country, near to nature, in some beautiful, romantic half-ruined house which could be carefully repaired by him and his friends. There he could set up a community of craft workers who would live in accordance with another of Morris' principles, 'Nothing should be done in his workshop which he did not know how to do himself.' Accordingly Gimson had learnt to mould and carve traditional plasterwork, much to the amazement of the owner of the company, who could not understand why a gentleman would want to 'mess about' with plaster which he considered 'dirty stuff'. He also found a traditional country bodger who taught him how to make ladder-back, rush-seated chairs.
Gimson found much inspiration for his work in the flowers and wild animals he saw on long country walks. As Norman Jewson recounts, 'Walking was a passion. He once walked forty miles in one day. He was perpetually on the look-out for the signs and sounds of wild life around him. He knew most bird calls, the haunts of badgers and foxes, where the dipper rested and the red squirrel had his drey.'
It was when Gimson was out on such a walk, with Ernest and his brother Sidney Barnsley, that he caught a glimpse of a remote house, lying half hidden up a wooded valley. It was Pinbury Park, an isolated Jacobean house near Tunley, flanked by enormous grouped sycamores and elms. Though the house was in a bad state of repair, while the terraced gardens were 'jungles of every kind of weed and their walls dilapidated', Gimson and the Barnsley brothers rented the house on a repairing lease from Lord Bathurst. Here was all the space they needed, extra cottages for guests and family, barns for workshops and acres of cider orchards with vast cellars to store it. As Powell wrote, 'it was a dream come true. A place perfectly architected and perfectly left alone, it held you entranced in its beauty'.
But in 1902 the group had to leave Pinbury Park. Each member of the group was to build their own house in Sapperton, while Daneway House was to become the showroom for their furniture. But what had started out as an ideal partnership was beginning to show signs of tension.
Ernest Barnsley quarrelled with Gimson and in later years put most of his efforts into the building of Rodmarton Manor, while Sidney Barnsley preferred to work alone and remained faithful to the Arts and Crafts practice of making all his own pieces.
It was Gimson who was busy in the workshops encouraging and training the apprentices. As Powell wrote. 'His attitude to his workmen was always the same, and he watched for their interests and was always planning and desiring to encourage them and give them his best.' Thus many young men from the neighbourhood came to work under his direction and working to his high standards and brilliant designs, they themselves became master craftsmen.
Gimson the Architect
'Architecture and building were the master interest of his life' Alfred Powell
The Cotswolds are now famous both as a place to live and to visit but when Gimson first came here they were, as Powell remembered, 'a mystery land of difficult hills and deeply wooded valleys'. Yet such was the fame of the furnituremakers that hundreds of visitors managed to find their way to Daneway House. Rich and titled people came from London, while others travelled from as far afield as the USA and Australia.
Yet, although Gimson's cottage, which he had designed himself, was much admired by visitors, disappointingly, very little work came his way. Griggs in the memorial compiled after his death wrote, 'The few buildings to his name prove that he could have done as much for architecture as he did for his chosen crafts and perhaps a great deal more. In the end he built nothing but the library and hall of Bedales School and a few small houses.' But Griggs did not mention one of Gimson's most important commissions. In 1907 he was asked to remodel Waterlane House and this was to become one of his outstanding architectural achievements.
Waterlane House
The house, originally called Field House, was built in 1845 by the wealthy clothier and landowner Thomas Baker, who lived at the nearby Watercombe House. For many years the house was occupied by Thomas Baker's sister and her husband.
An attractive, Regency style villa symmetrically built with handsome chimneys and fine sash windows, it was an elegant house, well suited for a gentleman and his wife. Many of its details are similar to Watercombe House. Both houses have open ironwork porches dated 1844 and 1845 and the details of door surrounds, staircases and fireplaces are identical.
In 1907 the house finally passed out of the hands of the Baker family when it was sold, with 15 acres of land, to an officer in the Royal Artillery, Major McMeekan. Although he had fought with distinction in the Boer War, the Major had nearly died from typhoid fever. He never fully recovered his health and decided to take early retirement. His dream was to lead a quiet life, 'away from it all', in some old Cotswold manor house.
To finance his plan he sold a family heirloom, a Romney portrait, and set off for Gloucestershire where he had friends. This part of the country was very popular with retired army officers. After a great deal of searching he found, as his son recorded in his diary, 'an ugly eight room farmhouse'. However, the house 'was in a lovely position on the edge of the hamlet of Waterlane with beautiful views across the valleys'.
Major McMeekan not only wanted a much larger house (there were only four bedrooms), he wanted something more Cotswold, more antique and more Elizabethan. He had heard that Gimson was making a name for himself as an architect and, as the Major's son wrote, his father 'had no strong artistic gifts but he did know a good architect when he found one'. Gerald Brenan1 remembered the Major. He was 'alert and interested in new things, he made friends with the Rothensteins and others of the incoming arty tribe'.
Gimson faced a considerable challenge. On a limited budget, just £1,350, he had to turn the modest villa into an imposing Cotswold manor house, fit out the interior with doors, fireplaces, hinges, window fittings and provide furniture. Everything was to be made of the very best materials with the highest standard of craftsmanship. The house is visible proof that Gimson did not fail. He created a fine house with four reception rooms and nine bedrooms. All the work was supervised by Norman Jewson. This was his first job as Gimson's architectural; assistant and each morning as he walked from his cottage in Oakridge to the workshops in Sapperton, he spent an hour or so at the house.
Gerald Brenan wrote his own impression of Waterlane House in his memoirs:
Gimson's doctrine that the functional is the basis of the beautiful came to me as a draught of fresh air in a stuffy lumber room. Both his own house and the McMeekans' which he designed, offered admirable illustrations of it. Bare stone walls displaying the masons' chisel marks or else linen-pattern panelling: heavy waxed tables, rush bottomed chairs and iron fire dogs. For only ornament the fine grain of an elm wood cuphoard or an old silk hanging. My mother complained of the bareness of such rooms but to me they were not only beautiful but moral.
The family settled into life at the new house and became largely self-sufficient, as did most families at that time.
The 15 acres were put to good use when William Gardiner, 'a small man of about 60 with a hunch back and white beard and cheeks like a russet apple', was taken on. He looked after the cows, pigs and chickens. the vegetable garden and orchard. So the family had its own fruit, vegetables and milk and even sold its surpluses of butter and cured bacon.
However, unlike their cottage neighbours, the McMeekans received 'a case of luxuries once a month from Harrods'!
The Major played an active role in local public life, becoming a magistrate and a councillor for the old urban district council. Sadly, however, after only a few years, the Major became seriously ill and he died of cancer on 17 June 1913.
He had had only a short time to enjoy his perfect Cotswold dream.
Much of the above is an extract from 'Oakridge a History' by Pat Carrick, Kay Rhodes and Juliet Shipman, available from Oakridge History Group, price £15 through the ‘Contact Us’ page or from the Oakridge Village Shop.
Source
Rights
Relation
Sources
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Comino, Mary (1980). Gimson and the Barnsleys:'Wonderful furniture of a commonplace kind'. London: Evans Brothers Limited. ISBN 0237448955.
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Nicholas Mander, Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire: a short history and guide (Owlpen Press, current edition, 2006) OCLC 57576417 ISBN 0-9546056-1-6
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W.R. Lethaby, F.L. Griggs & Alfred Powell, Ernest Gimson, his life and work (1924)
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Norman Jewson, By Chance I did Rove (Cirencester, 1951 (reprinted))
Gloucestershire Archive holds the following :
1. Comprises photographs, photocopies and cuttings: Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft, Chipping Campden; Gimson & Barnsley at Pinbury and Sapperton; Cranham and other potteries; other crafts, C20, ref. D8709/1/1
2. Guild of Craftsmen, Records include: confidential report on the possible reorgansiation of the Guild, 1956; a critical survey of Guild administration and staffing by the Honorary Treasurer, 1958 Memorabilia includes newscutting about retirement of Basil Roberts, Rural Industries Organiser, 1955; newscutting about Daneway House, 1955 - 1959, ref. D8709/1/6
3. Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen - Extensive records, 1888 - 2000, ref. D8709
4. Rural Industries Committee report (to Gloucestershire Community council) on exhibition of rural industries, 1926; rules of the Gloucestershire Rural Craftsmen's Society Ltd, 1927, 1920 - 1929, ref. D8709/1/1
5. Fred Francis Foster (d. 1968), fine furniture maker, was a founder member of the Guild and also a resident of Whiteway Colony near Stroud. He worked with the important group of craftsmen under foreman Peter van der Waals at Daneway House and later at Haliday Mill, Chalford., 1909 - 1984, ref. D8709/2/3
External links
More on the Barnsley Brothers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_brothers
http://www.owlpen.com/arts/sidney-barnsley
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