Designer Biography

William Burges

Born: 1827

Died: 1881

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After completing his articles with Edward Blore, Burges assisted Matthew Digby Wyatt in the preparation of his illustrated volumes, Metal Work and its Artistic Design (1852) and The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1851-3). The experience gave him a thorough grounding in decorative design. He began to design furniture in 1858 with the first of a series of pieces for the Yatman family. Although Burges acknowledged a debt to Viollet-le-Duc, especially the Dictionnaire raisonne de l' architecture (1858-68) and the Dictionnaire du mobilier francais (1858-71), he had himself made drawings on his Continental travels in 1853, including the thirteenth-century Noyon cupboard on which one of the Yatman cabinets is based. His contributions to Gilbert Scott's Gleanings from Westminster Abbey (1860) reveal the source of many of his ideas. His Cantor Lectures given at the Royal Society of Arts in 1864 were published as Art Applied to Industry (1865). In 1864 he took over the supervision of church plate for the Ecclesiological Society from G. E. Street. He designed furniture for his patron the Marquess of Bute, for whom he worked from 1869 until his death, and wallpapers for Jeffrey & Co., but his own comfortable financial circumstances and the patronage of Lord Bute protected him from any real need to pander to the whims of manufacturers with an eye to public demand.