Robin Day (designer)

A couple of postings ago I featured the mid-century textile designs of Lucienne Day, half of the dynamic duo, Robin and Lucienne Day. Robin, born 1915, is famous as a furniture designer, in fact he's best known for his injection moulded polypropylene stacking chair, of which over 20 million have been manufactured. It was one of the first pieces of furniture to fully use the mass-manufacturing opportunities of injection moulding.
Robin Day graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1938. In 1942 he married the textile designer, Lucienne Conradi. They both opened a design office in 1948 and Day began working as a freelance exhibition, graphic and industrial designer.

A room setting at the 1951 Milan Triennale

Robin Day with textiles designed by Lucienne Day

In 1949 Day entered the 'International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design' held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Day won first prize with Clive Latimer for his wooden and tubular metal storage units.
Day was commissioned by Hills International to design modern furniture for the 1949 'British Industry Fair'. In 1950 Day designed Hill's corporate identity and became the company’s chief designer.
In 1951 Day was awarded a Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale for his design of his 'Homes and Gardens' pavilion at the Festival of Britain.
From 1962 to 1963 Day worked on the Polyprop chair. From 1963 to the present day over 14 million chairs have been sold in twenty three countries. It has been described as one of the most democratic modern designs of the 20th century.

Hillestack chair

The RD1 is an outdoor table is designed for longevity of use. It was originally designed for the 1951 Festival of Britain and has lost none of impact since the. The frame is made from tubular steel and epoxy coated. The table slats are made from sustainable acacia wood so that the chair weathers well. The form is particularly rigid, aided by the wide positioning of the legs. An understated design, the RD1 is rational and universal in spirit.

RD1 table

Polo chair

Magis Sussex table

Avian sofa

Club armchair

John Atkinson Grimshaw

In an exchange on Twitter the other day with the marvellous actor James A. Fleet (Four Weddings & a Funeral, Vicar of Dibley, and I believe made for the role of Frederick Dorrit in BBC’s ‘Little Dorrit’) about the marvellous painter John Atkinson Grimshaw I have been prompted to take another look at Grimshaw’s beautifully atmospheric works.
John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 1893) was a Victorian painter known for his city scenes and landscapes. He was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement initially but soon found his own ‘voice’, painting mainly urban scenes at twilight, dawn, and at night. He also indulged in some fashionable fairy paintings but personally I don’t think they’re among his best works.

He was born 6 September 1836 in Leeds. In 1856 he married his cousin Frances Hubbard (1835-1917). In 1861, at the age of 24, to the dismay of his parents, he departed from his first job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to pursue a career in art.

Grimshaw's paintings were sold in two art galleries, smaller picture dealers and a couple of bookshops in Leeds. One of his main customers was Thomas Fenteman, who owned an antiquarian booksellers. Fenteman was a deeply religious man and would only buy the pictures after Grimshaw had confirmed that they had not been painted on a Sunday.

He began exhibiting in 1862, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, with paintings mainly of birds, fruit, and blossoms. Grimshaw became a popular artist in Leeds and in 1865 he was able to move with his wife to a more expensive part of the city. William Agnew, a London art dealer, began purchasing his work. Further success came when a picture by Grimshaw was accepted by the Royal Academy. By 1870 Grimshaw was in a position to buy Knostrop Old Hall, a large seventeenth-century manor house, two miles from Leeds. Fanny Grimshaw gave birth to fifteen children but only six reached adulthood.

Several of his children, Arthur Grimshaw (1864-1913), Louis H Grimshaw (1870-1944), Wilfred Grimshaw (1871-1937) and Elaine Grimshaw (1877-1970), also became painters.

Lucienne Day

I do love the textile designs of Lucienne Day. She and her husband Robin Day were a mid-century design power duo, often referred to as the British Eameses. Her designs were so groundbreaking and enduring that people still refer to them by name.
Désirée Lucienne Day was born in 1917 and died this year aged 93. Inspired by abstract art, she pioneered the use of bright, optimistic, abstract patterns in post-war England, and eventually grew celebrated worldwide.

Born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England, Day was daughter of an English mother and a Belgian father who worked as an insurance broker. She attended convent school in Worthing, and at 17 enrolled in the Croydon School of Art, where she discovered a love of printed textiles. Later she attended the Royal College of Art, where she was a top student.

Through her career, Lucienne Day won many awards, including the International Design Award of the American Institute of Decorators in 1952, and the Gran Premio prize at the Milan Triennale in 1954. In 1962, she was made a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), an award which honours designers who have achieved "sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry." She was the fifth woman to be made an RDI.

Her work combined organic shapes with bright patterns inspired by contemporary abstract painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró. She believed that good design should be affordable, and in 2003 told the Scotsman newspaper that she had been "very interested in modern painting although I didn’t want to be a painter. I put my inspiration from painting into my textiles, partly, because I suppose I was very practical. I still am. I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and be used by people. They had been starved of interesting things for their homes in the war years, either textiles or furniture."

Her breakthrough print was “Calyx” (see below), a brightly-coloured textile that she created for the Festival of Britain in 1951. She went on to produce hundreds of colourful abstract prints for industry clients such as Heal's.

In the 1970s, Day stopped designing mass production fabrics, turning instead to creating what she called “mosaics”: large tapestries made of thousands of pieces of Thai and Indian silk. They currently hang in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, and the coffee shop of a John Lewis store in Kingston upon Thames.

Through a career spanning more than five decades, she stood out not just because she was a highly successful working woman during a time in which many women didn't work, but also due to her creative partnership with her husband, furniture designer Robin Day. For 50 years they worked, together but independently, in a shared studio, and their house grew to be considered the epitome of 1950s sophistication.

The development of their styles can be traced in Lesley Jackson's book Robin and Lucienne Day: Pioneers in Modern Design, published in 2001. An exhibition of Lucienne Day's textiles and Robin Day's furniture, "Robin and Lucienne Day: Design and the Modern Interior", will be held in Spring 2011 at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester — the city where the Days retired in 2000, in order to be closer to their Sussex cottage, where Lucienne spent much of her time in the garden.

Leadenhall Market

Anyone noticed what a beautiful structure Leadenhall Market in Gracechurch Street in the City of London is? I first discovered it when I was at art school and did a project doing on-the-spot drawings of London Markets, most of which have closed, or at least moved location, like Covent Garden fruit and veg market and Billingsgate fish market.
The market dates back to the fourteenth century. It's open Monday to Friday and sells fresh foodstuffs. Among the vendors are cheese-mongers, butchers and florists. Originally it was a meat, game and poultry market (my drawing from 1967 shows a poulterer's premises - Butcher & Edmonds - sadly are no longer in the market, but are still going in a new location in the East End). A bit worrying that my drawing more closely resembles the engraving (left) from 1881 rather than the current photographs!
The ornate roof structure, painted green, maroon and cream, and the cobbled floors of the structure designed in 1881 by Sir Horace Jones (also the architect of Billingsgate and Smithfield Markets) make the building a popular tourist attraction.
It was used to represent the area of London near 'The Leaky Cauldron' and 'Dragon Alley' in the film 'Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone', and is featured in the film 'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'.

Heath Robinson

William Heath Robinson (31 May 1872 – 13 September 1944) was an English cartoonist and illustrator, who signed himself W. Heath Robinson. He is best known for drawings of eccentric machines and "Heath Robinson" has entered the language as a description of any unnecessarily complex and implausible contraption.
William Heath Robinson was born into a family of artists in Islington, London. His father and brothers Thomas Heath Robinson and Charles Robinson were all illustrators. His early career was as a book illustrator, for example in Hans Christian Andersen's Danish Fairy Tales and Legends (1897); The Arabian Nights, (1899); Tales From Shakespeare (1902), and Twelfth Night (1908), Andersen's Fairy Tales (1913), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1914), Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1915), and Walter de la Mare's Peacock Pie (1916).

In the course of this however he also wrote and illustrated two children's books, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902) and Bill the Minder (1912); these are regarded as the start of his career in the depiction of unlikely machines. During the First World War he drew large numbers of cartoons, collected as Some "Frightful" War Pictures (1915), Hunlikely! (1916), and Flypapers (1919), depicting ever-more-unlikely secret weapons being used by the combatants.

In 1903 he married Josephine Latey, the daughter of newspaper editor John Latey. Heath Robinson moved to Pinner, Middlesex, in 1908. His house in Moss Lane is commemorated by a blue plaque. A project is now (2007) in hand to restore West House, in Memorial Park, Pinner, to house a Heath Robinson Collection.