Designer Biography

Charles Robert Ashbee

Born: 1863

Died: 1942

See items in our stock by Charles Robert Ashbee

Having studied at Kings College, Cambridge, Charles Robert Ashbee entered the architectural office of the Gothic Revivalist G.F. Bodley in 1886.  During this period Ashbee also attended Toynbee Hall, a university settlement in the east end of London, where he attended a lecture by William Morris on the Aims of Art.  It was at Toynbee that he conceived the idea of The Guild of Handicraft, an idea that he discussed with Morris:

‘Very undefined at first, the notion was that a school should be carried on in connection with a workshop; that the men in this workshop should be the teachers in the school and that the pupils in the school should be drafted into the workshop as it grew in strength and certainty’

On the 23 June 1888 the Guild of Handicraft was formed and with his four founder members, Fred Hubbard, John Pearson, John Williams and C .V.Adams, Ashbee exhibited a small group of work at the first ACES show in 1888.  In 1890 an ideal premises was found for the Guild at Essex House in the Mile End Road and their repertoire expanded to include woodwork, metalwork, decorative painting, leather work, enameling and jewelry.  The Guild also established the Essex House private printing press in 1898, having purchased the Albion press and numerous types used at the Kelmscott Press which had closed two years after the death of its founder, William Morris.  Also in 1898 the Guild executed the furniture for Baillie Scott’s schemes for the Darmstadt Palace of the Grand Duke of Hesse and in 1899, after another successful ACES exhibition, a show room was opened in Brook Street.  In 1900 their work was included in the Vienna Secession Exhibition and in 1902 the ever-expanding enterprise moved out of London to Chipping Campden, not far from the workshops of Ernest Gimson and Edward Barnsley.  From here the Guild carried on production under Ashbee’s uncompromising standards and faced with fierce competition from more commercially minded firms such as Liberty, it was forced into closure in 1907.

Ashbee’s knowledge of metalworking appears to largely originate from Cellini’s Treatises, which he translated and which were published at Essex House in 1898.  Ashbee was a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, a formative influence on the design of Liberty’s jewelry and silver work, and an inspiration to the Secessionists in Vienna whose own Wiener Werksatte was based on the Guild of Handicrafts model.  He exhibited with the ACES from 1888 and in the Vienna Secession Exhibition nos. VIII 1900, XV 1905, XVIII and XXIV 1906.