Designer Biography

Ernest Gimson

Born: 1864

Died: 1919

See items in our stock by Ernest Gimson

In 1884 William Morris visited Leicester, the home town of Ernest Gimson, to lecture on ‘Art & Socialism’.  Already apprenticed to the local architect, Isaac Barradale, Gimson asked Morris for an introduction to a London office.  He provided several and it was ultimately J D Sedding who took Gimson into his practice where he met Edward Barnsley and Alfred Powell, who remained close associates throughout his life.  At the Art Workers Guild in 1886, Gimson saw the work of the traditional chair bodger Philip Clisset and the following year he began a short apprenticeship under Clissett to learn the true fundamental principles and skills of the English vernacular tradition of chair construction.  From this point onwards Gimson was to devote himself to the continuation and evolution of this tradition; in 1890 with the like-minded individuals, William Lethaby, Mervyn Macartney, Reginald Blomfield and Sidney Barnsley he founded the firm Kenton & Company; ‘with the object of supplying furniture of good design and good workmanship’.  In 1892 Gimson and Barnsley moved to the Cotswolds where their workshops successfully produced furniture, metalwork and plaster work in the vernacular style.  On his death Sidney Barnsley completed his unfinished architectural commissions and his assistant Peter Waals continued the furniture workshop, which survived at Chalford until 1938.