English Chairs

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942), a highly important oak chair, with an Art Nouveau floral back. Mackmurdo's influence in Europe is recognized as having produced the earliest examples of Art Nouveau, particularly in the styling of a chair-back designed in 1882 and the title page for Wren's City Churches a year later. The present chair was designed for the head of Rainhill hospital St Helen's south Lancashire/Merseyside (now demolished), an institute for the mentally ill, as part of an interior scheme for his study. It was almost certainly designed and made only for this interior, unlike the earlier chair which was designed in 1882 and made and sold until 1888. It was originally thought this interior was designed by the Liverpool architect Edmund Rathbone whose brother, Harold Rathbone, founded the Della Robbia Pottery factory in 1894. A picture is shown in Jeremy Cooper's Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors, p. 199, illus. 516, from the Bedford Lemere archive at the National Monuments Record, apparently credited as 'Rainhill, Edmund Rathbone'. But Edmund Rathbone was actually the Century Guild...