In his important book The English Regional Chair, Bill Cotton heads his chapter on West Midlands Chairs (which includes an account of the Clissett family) with a photograph of a painting (see page 286). This painting, by the Worcestershire artist Edward Thompson Davis, shows the interior of a West Midlands cottage, and is dated around 1880 (the date is incorrect as Davis died in 1867, and was active as a painter from about 1854).

Bill draws attention to the ladderback chair that the woman is seated on (I’ve shown only a small portion of the painting here) as being in the West Midlands tradition. He doesn’t mention the chair to the left which is rather different, but can still be linked to the West Midlands, albeit to a slightly different thread in the tradition.

This chair is a half-arm ladderback in many respects to the chair illustrated in The English Regional Chair as WM14. These half-arm chairs crop up from time to time in various configurations, and were clearly part of the West Midlands oeuvre. The one shown in the painting has five slats to the back, curved back legs, widely spaced stretchers, no obvious finial, and a rather bulbous arm support. Like the other chair in the painting, it appears to have a rush seat.

The artist, Edward Thompson Davis, is of real interest because he is known for painting local life in Worcestershire, and his work seems to include many interiors. In addition to the one shown here (entitled “For what we are about to receive”), I’ve located another four showing West Midlands style chairs. These are all of the straight-backed variety, very similar to the ladderback in the centre of the image above. None of them show a chair of the half-arm variety (nor, for that matter, a spindleback of the type made by Clissett). A couple of these painting are shown below, one with a four-rung example, and the other with a five-rung.

I’m drawing attention to this for two reasons. Firstly, that there’s a little more in these paintings than was drawn out in The English Regional Chair (that’s not surprising, as we’re 30 years further on, and we have the advantage of internet searching). Secondly, I have examples of both these types of chair showing some characteristics that link them to Clissett’s ladderback. So I can expand further on the minimal link made in Bill Cotton’s book between Clissett and Kerry – or, rather, there is further evidence here that suggests there needn’t have been any direct link at all, merely a working in a particular thread in the West Midlands tradition.

To follow this up, I’ll post on each of these chairs in turn.

You can click on the images below to enlarge them...

In previous posts, and in the chapter on Clissett and the Arts and Crafts Movement, I’ve identified several paintings that include Clissett ladderback chairs as an important part of the composition. Here we have another, this time by William Ratcliffe (1870-1955). It’s up for auction next month (October 2020) at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh, and much of what follows comes from their description of the painting.

Ratcliffe studied wallpaper design in Manchester under Walter Crane. The family moved house, in 1906, from Manchester to Letchworth, the new Garden City with many Arts & Crafts influences, and where we know that many houses were furnished with Clissett’s chairs. A couple of years later, the artist Harold Gilman also moved to Letchworth and became a neighbour of the Ratcliffe family. Under Gilman’s influence, Ratcliffe gave up wallpaper design and took up painting. He was introduced to the Campden Town Group by Gilman, and showed paintings in all three of the group’s exhibitions.

This particular painting is thought to depict the home of Stanley and Signe Parker at 102 Wilbury Road, Letchworth. Several photographs of the interior of this house exist, and they show several Clissett ladderbacks. It certainly seems likely that this is the suggested location, especially as Ratcliffe knew the Parkers, and is known to have visited them.

It’s worth noting that Gilman also painted a room containing a Clissett ladderback. In that instance, the chair almost certainly belonged to Gilman himself.

or a while during my research into Philip Clissett, previously unknown examples of his designs turned up fairly frequently. But the past two or three years have been a barren period, until I was contacted by Stephen Farr. Stephen is related to Philip Clissett, and has recently acquired a chair that appeared to be by Clissett (having the PC stamp) but differed from anything on this website in several respects.
The chair is a high-backed armchair with a rush seat, and it follows the general pattern of Clissett’s spindleback armchairs. But this one has a spindle pattern not previously seen on an armchair, and is an elongated version of the most complex of Clissett’s known patterns – known only from one or two side chairs by Philip himself (chair no 10 on the spindleback chair page), and by his brother-in-law William Cole (chair no 3 in the WC section of the relatives’ chairs page). The pattern is based on other Clissett patterns, but includes a ball with V-cut below at the top, an ovolo with taper below at the bottom, and a double V-cut (instead of the usual single) at the mid-constriction.

While the fancy spindle singles this chair out as something special, additional turned rings on the front legs add to the distinction – there are two extra below each arm support turning, and two extra above the feet. Similar additional rings are seen on the fanciest of Clissett and Cole’s side chairs, which have equivalent fancy spindles.

The last distinctive feature of this chair is the single front stretcher, in contrast to Clissett’s almost universal double stretcher. The only other exception to his double rule are, again, the fanciest of side chairs which sport the only known examples of Clissett pattern-turned stretchers .

Overall, this chair is the most complex armchair by Philip Clissett found to date. Certainly, there will be others out there. Please get in touch if you know of any.

Harold Gilman (1876-1919) was an important member of the Camden Group, a group of artists that included Walter Sickert and Augustus John. This picture, painted in 1916, includes a clear and prominent Clissett chair. The image is known to be of Gilman's own rooms in Maple Street, off Tottenham Court Road. He had previously lived in Letchworth where he may well have come across Clissett's chairs, which we know to have been in a number of houses.

We can only assume that this chair belonged to Gilman himself. Whatever the case, Gilman can be added to the lengthening list of artists and architects who lived with Clissett's chairs.

This painting is in the Kirklees Collection of the Huddersfield Art Gallery. Gilman was the subject of a major exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in 2019.

Ernest Gimson was an important Arts & Crafts architect and designer. As you probably know, he came across Philip Clissett after seeing his chairs at the Art Workers Guild, and subsequently spent some time at Clissett's workshop learning about chairmaking. He designed rush-seated chairs based on what he learned and, after trying his hand at chairmaking, went into partnership with Edward Gardiner who was rather better at it. Gardiner continued to make chairs long after Gimson's death, and first Neville Neal, then Lawrence Neal, brought the Clissett tradition of chairmaking right up to the present day.

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Once Philip Clissett’s chairs started to be used at the Art Workers Guild in the late 1880s, they seem to have become very popular amongst Arts & Crafts practitioners. In time, the demand for this type of chair seems to have filtered into the general furniture trade, and a wide variety of designs appears, all loosely based on the Clissett ladderback. This is just one example.

This chair appeared in Heals of London’s catalogue for 1907 (illustrated here), and was manufactured by William Bartlett of High Wycombe (thanks to Oliver Heal for this information). Heals appears to have started buying them in 1900, and stocked them until at least 1920. There was also a side chair. It’s likely that they were sold more widely than just Heals – Norman & Stacey, Artistic House Furnishers of London also seems to have stocked then (thanks to Paul Shutler for this information).

The chair is constructed in, mainly, fumed oak – I think the stretchers are beech. Fuming is a process involving ammonia that darkens the wood and brings out the grain. The rush seat has been replaced in this particular example, and would originally have had edge protectors, strips of thin wood pinned to the edges of the seat to reduce wear to the rush.

Although the chair looks superficially similar to Clissett’s ladderback, there are many differences; the timber is just one. The chair is obviously factory made, having none of the character of a country, handmade item. There is no pegging; it’s held together entirely by glue. The seat edges are curved, making this appear a rather more sophisticated design. Turnings are different too, and the finished parts are thicker and heavier in appearance. While the overall height of the chair is more or less the same as the Clissett, the arms are higher, and the seat is bigger in all dimensions, particularly in depth. Despite the greater depth, it’s not a particularly comfortable chair to sit in. This seems to be due to a very upright back – despite having a curve to the back legs, the designer failed to get any slope into the back, something that Clissett achieved superbly.

While there could be some concern that these chairs might be directly mistaken for Clissett’s work, but I haven’t (yet) seen that happen. But I have seen them offered for sale by two separate dealers as “designed by Ernest Gimson and possibly made by Edward Gardiner”, and by one saleroom as “attributed to C.R. Mackintosh”. These are convoluted errors that dedicated readers of this website will appreciate.

David Knell's book English Country Furniture (1992) contains a photograph of a Philip Clissett ladderback armchair that was "stated to have been one of a small set bought directly from (Ernest) Gimson by Eric Gill, the calligrapher, as a gift to his sister, Gladys Mary Gill, on the occasion of her marriage in 1909" (see Knell's Figure 299). Knell attributes the chair to Edward Gardiner, Gimson's chairmaker, as so often happens, but it is definitely a Clissett.

In fact, Gill owned at least one Clissett ladderback himself. It can be seen (just, right at the bottom) in the photograph of Gill in his engraving shop in about 1940. Gill was a member of the Art Workers Guild for about five years in the early 20th century, resigning at about the same time as his sister married. He would have known Clissett's chairs from there.

How reliable is the story about the provenance of the set of Clissett chairs that Gill is supposed to have purchased? Well, the chair in Knell's photograph belonged to "a descendant of the original recipient". From Knell's photographic acknowledgements, we can see that this is probably "Mrs R. Stewart-Jones". A little research shows that this is actually the daughter of Gladys Gill by her second marriage. So the provenance is good, and the story reasonable, though it's not possible to corroborate the suggestion that Gimson was obtaining Clissett's chairs for others - essentially acting as an agent.

Except that we know that Gimson bought a good number of chairs from the Clissett workshop as late as 1914, so he clearly stayed in touch with the Clissetts and traded with them, despite having his own chair-making business.

Indulge your passion for rush-seated chairs at a two-day conference at Marchmont House near Berwick-on-Tweed during September, on Friday 14th and Saturday 15th. Marchmont House looks well worth seeing, and the conference is brings together an interesting range of topics including several regional chair traditions. Marchmont has several chairs by Clissett, and there will be a session tracing the origins and legacy of his well-known ladderback.

More details, and a full programme is available on Eventbrite, where you can also make a booking.

Some time ago, I saw this chair on the Antiques Atlas site, advertised as "by Philip Clissett". It's a very handsome chair but, while I will agree that the chair has many of the characteristics of Clissett's work (such as the general construction and the arm support turnings), there are several reasons for NOT accepting the attribution. The main reasons are as follows:

1. There is no "PC" stamp anywhere on the chair. Without this, and recognising that several other makers (e.g. John Warrender and William Cole) made chairs identical to Clissett's, you need good provenance information to make the attribution - e.g. an original bill of sale.
2. Although many stamped Philip Clissett chairs are known, and a reasonable number of Warrender and Cole chairs, none are identical, or even close, in form to the chair in the photograph, as set out below.
3. Stamped armchairs never have arms like the chair in the photograph which are club-shaped with rounded ends.
4. Stamped armchairs never have backs exactly like the chair in the photograph, in particular the dowel top rail, but the spindles are also atypical.
5. This chair is made entirely in some sort of fruitwood. I've never seen a chair by Clissett entirely made in fruitwood (doesn't mean there aren't any). They are usually entirely in ash, though arms and the flat top rail can be in cherry or some other timber.
6. I've seen several chairs that share some characteristics with this one (including being entirely in fruitwood), but they never have the workshop scribe marks that Clissett used to mark the position of side stretcher mortices. While I haven't had my hands on this particular chair, I think it's unlikely that it has these marks. (OK, this is speculation, and doesn't really count.)

The existence of a group of chairs that share characteristics with this one, and many characteristics with Clissett's output, suggests strongly a very local tradition that Clissett was part of. Given that I've logged a total of seventeen chairmakers with the Clissett name, and a total of twenty-one chairmakers in the extended family, the existence of a very local tradition isn't surprising. So are these unstamped chairs coming from other members of the Clissett family? Quite possibly, but this remains an unproven hypothesis until further evidence is found.

It's quite possible that Clissett didn't stamp all his chairs. Indeed, I'm aware of two very unusual chairs in the Hereford Museum where one is stamped "PC" and the other, which is identical, is not. But this doesn't mean that any chair that looks like it could be by Clissett can be attributed to him. As I said before, without the provenance, this is just misleading. As always... Caveat emptor!