C. F. A. Voysey (1857-1941) was one of the leading architects of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was of the generation that immediately followed A W N Pugin and E W Godwin and, like them, saw the architect’s role as not to simply design a building but also the objects and furnishings that would be found within it, from the paper on the walls to the cutlery on the table. Even before his architectural career was fully established, he was widely celebrated as the leading pattern designer of his generation and would go on to design furniture, metalware, lighting, sculpture, and ceramics.
Voysey had a long career as a designer but his career as an architect was all but over by 1914. Hailed by Pevsner as a pioneer of the Modern Movement—something he vigorously refuted—he viewed himself as a proponent of the English Gothic, the ‘last disciple of Pugin’.
This talk will illustrate most aspects of this complex and contradictory architect’s work and using Voysey’s own words will explore the very personal ideology that informed his work and attempt to explain his motivations in challenging the architectural establishment of his day to the detriment of his career.
Biography
Tony Peart is a Senior Lecturer in Illustration at The University of Cumbria and a Trustee of the C. F. A. Voysey Society. He has researched and written about most aspects of Voysey’s work as a designer as well as other aspects of nineteenth and early twentieth century decorative design. He has been researching a monograph on The Birmingham Guild of Handicraft for many years and has just had a paper published on The Betula Ltd., a small London firm of furniture makers who in the 1930s designed and manufactured anthroposophical furniture (expressionist furniture inspired by the ideas of the philosopher and mystic Rudolf Steiner).